OTTplay Reviews: Dhadak 2, Son of Sardaar 2

Dhadak 2: Shazia Iqbal’s Caste Drama Offers Course Correction

Dhadak 2 borrows its beats from Mari Selvaraj's Pariyerum Perumal but vibrates with its own music. It is a tender task, situated between adapting and creating, performing and inhabiting, miming and mining. Ishita Sengupta reviews.

Dir: Shazia Iqbal

Cast: Siddhant Chaturvedi, Triptii Dimri

Playing in: Theatres

SHAZIA IQBAL'S Dhadak 2 stands on dented shoulders. Like its spiritual predecessor, Dhadak (2018) — adapted from Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (2016) — it too borrows the contours from another language film, Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018). This baffling practice of sharing genesis with acclaimed sources renders the franchise open to closer scrutiny and resistant to unbiased engagement. Observations are accompanied by comparisons, and every question heads in a similar direction: did it improve on the primary material?

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With the first film, the query was easy to resolve. Shashank Khaitan’s Dhadak reduced Sairat’ s caste struggle to a homegrown class difference, making even the impending tragedy feel facile. Iqbal’s film, however, puts forth a more complicated proposition. Hers is a more faithful rendition of the original and by virtue of that, a rare mainstream Hindi film to tackle caste politics with central force. Dhadak 2 ’s distinction then is reiteration — an audacious task still, reflected in the 19 cuts the film accrued from the CBFC, ranging from blurring of casteist slurs to references to caste. The certification board’s cageyness has the most strident representation in the opening disclaimer that claims everything in the film to be fictional — the city it is based in, the depicted violence, mentions of suicide, etc; the denial is no different from Hindi cinema’s long-standing propensity of looking away from caste-based issues. Emerging from this darkness, Iqbal’s film offers a course-correction.

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Son of Sardaar 2: Brain-Melting Is Now A Movie Genre

Son of Sardaar 2 is an absolute bonkers of a film. It is nuttier than the Housefulls (complimentary) and more outlandish than the Golmaal (s) (not).

Dir: Vijay Kumar Arora

Cast: Ajay Devgn, Mrunal Thakur

Playing in: Theatres

IT IS ONLY JULY but I doubt there will be another Hindi film as weird as Son of Sardaar 2. To be fair, weird is what most mainstream comedies bet on, bringing in everything from snoring crocodiles to hostile monkeys for drawing laughs. The intent is to be unhinged because the idea is that nothing is out of bounds. Vijay Kumar Arora’s Son of Sardaar 2 subscribes to this school of thought but also goes several steps further, believing that nothing is sacred.

I am not sure if this is a bad thing. It probably is not. At a time when everyone is cagey and everything is considered sacrosanct, Arora’s film goes about making jokes about everything and everyone. It is both strange and startling, slapstick and absurdist. It is too much and too little, rendering Son of Sardaar 2 a film without the awareness of being one.

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Again, I am not sure if it is a bad thing. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. If my tone is non-committal it is because my brain is broken. It is all too baffling: Deepak Dobriyal portraying a transgender woman with the conviction deserving of a standalone film; Sharad Saxena going about finding women half his age to dance with; Sanjay Mishra randomly holding a VFX snake and asking it to get well soon; a clueless white woman being referred to by her Indian step children as “English mummy”; Ajay Devgn headlining what is presumably more progressive that anything he has starred in lately. Did anyone know what was happening? My guess is a hard no. This is the good news. The bad news is, neither do we.

— IS

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