Bawaal: An Absurd Enterprise Not Even Varun Dhawan Can Save

Some spoilers ahead.

VARUN DHAWAN, 18 films old, has a type. The actor has forever leaned towards characters who journey from self-importance to self-realisation. In other words, he essays men who are cushioned by the entitlement of masculinity only to register its fragility. Granted this is a recurring theme (even) in the social-message outings headlined by Ayushmann Khurrana but Dhawan’s portrayals feel radical because they culminate in the characters recognising what their gender enfolds without distancing themselves from it. They remain conservative but temper it with understanding and empathy. The actor’s career (Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Sui Dhaaga) can be defined by his enactment of men who are unified in their want to be a better man. His latest work, Bawaal is a reiteration of this but the film goes about this arc in the most implausible, tone-deaf and immature of ways, underlining the filmmaker’s stilted politics, if not his (de)merit.

Nitesh Tiwari’s Bawaal is what happens when a director is briefed by a moneyed studio to make something no one has ever seen and he, in turn, takes it as a leeway to make something no one should ever see. It is what happens when someone studies history using SparkNotes all his life and then, using that bulletin-knowledge, aspires to make a film on World War II. It is also what happens when the maker’s research involves listening to that one podcast where the host, a YouTuber with millions of followers on social media, asked the most absurd question of the century: “Hitler was evil, but who isn’t?”

The premise feels easy at the outset. The conflicts are left bare, awaiting resolution. Ajay Dixit (Dhawan) is a teacher in Lucknow. His expertise is supposed to be history but he spends time in the classroom discussing fantasy cricket with his students while assigning one to guard the door. His lack of understanding of the past can only be rivalled by his tangled present. His parents (the ever affable ​​Manoj Pahwa and Anjuman Saxena) don’t harbour much hope from him, and his relationship with his wife Nisha (Janhvi Kapoor) is strained. They have been married for nine months but barely exchange a word.

Because the actor essaying the role is Dhawan, the fault lies with him. Ajay, fondly called Ajju bhaiya by one and all, is what can be called a middling man. He has been mediocre in everything. To bypass a life of such mediocrity, he came up with the ruse of reputation. Ajay worked overtime in creating a persona that outsized his abilities. When we meet him, he is striving to sustain it. For instance, in school he freely spread lies that he was selected for the army or that he was one step away from becoming a collector. But each time, he maintained, it was either a physical injury or his mental resolve (like why not teach kids and help them become collectors instead of being one himself) that steered his career towards educating children. Everyone is dazzled by the surface — the principal of his school and other students alike. A colleague has his doubts but there is no proof. It is at home where his inherent cruelty reveals itself, most brazenly in his behaviour with Nisha.

Unlike him, she is good at everything. More crucially, she projects who she really is. When their families met to discuss marriage, she shared that she suffered from epilepsy although she didn’t have bouts for a while. Fatefully, on the day of her wedding, Nisha has a seizure and Ajay sees that. The sight threatens to disrupt his carefully-curated reality. What if he takes her out and she has a fit? What will people think of him? (Ajay is not the brightest bulb.) He finds the easiest way around: he refuses to acknowledge her. So far, so Varun Dhawan film.

The roadmap from here is familiar. There will come a moment in Bawaal when Ajay will regret his behaviour and see through the free pass he enjoys for being a man. Dhawan will showcase it by looking down, evoking an expression that throbs with contrition. Each film of his has arrived at this precise scene through different ways. Tiwari, who helmed outings like Dangal and Chhichhore in the past, does the same here but the path he forges is so bizarre that typing it feels like being at war with oneself. Oh wait.

You know how we use such similes to describe inner conflict? You know how we do it knowing it is an exaggeration? Well, Tiwari doesn’t. His latest film, Bawaal’s logline is “Every love story has its own war” and the filmmaker depicts it....by actually bringing in the war. In his story, the problems in a married couple’s life get resolved because they travel through the sites of the Second World War and realise that their issues are too small compared to what the Jews had gone through during 1939-1945. And yet, this is where things get downright outlandish, they are also convinced that every relationship goes through its own Auschwitz (yes, like the concentration camp for the Jews), and that the human ‘greed’ for always wanting something that is not theirs (like Ajay does in the film) makes one no different from Hitler (like the dictator who killed around 6 million European Jews during the war). Imagine mining a colossal tragedy to undermine its impact? Bawaal’s makers probably spell Holocaust as ‘hollow cause’.

When Ajay hits a student in class who turns out to be a politician’s son, his job as a school teacher is in jeopardy. Having no skills to show for himself, he does what he knows best: creates a bigger distraction. Ajay informs the principal that he will teach the remaining chapter in the syllabus, the one on World War II, through videos, by physically visiting the places…“Padhega Lucknow toh badhega Lucknow,” he says. He manages to procure money from his father by convincing him that he will take Nisha for a honeymoon. It is a lie. But she stands up for herself at the opportune time and they journey through France, Amsterdam, Berlin and Poland. The physical journey is supposed to mirror the metaphorical journey Dhawan’s character will undergo. Hitler is supposed to save their marriage (of all the absurd things I thought I would type this year, this sentence was not it). It is all too ridiculous.

Somehow, however, the visual language the film adopts turns out to be even more outrageous. When Ajay and Nisha visit Normandy Beach, the fateful site where on 6 June 1944, 4,000 Allied troops were killed by German soldiers, the context of the place moves him to tears. The film does not stop there but goes forth to transform the scene into a black and white war montage with a very teary Ajay standing at the centre (if you look really closely you will probably find a man called Chris Nolan shedding tears). The more the narrative unfolds, the absurdity escalates. As the excursion continues, Ajay sees Nisha for who she really is and in a Dhawanesque style reckons with the limitations of his gender. But it takes her to fight a petty thief, and make rajma chawal for him in a foreign land, to push him to come to that conclusion. Because, somewhere she too is convinced that she can do no better. Neither does the film.

For two and a half hours, Bawaal courses with tone-deafness with unimaginable confidence, reaching the crescendo at Poland. There is some context here. Ajay and Nisha just had a fight. He had called her a ‘defective piece’ and she retorted saying that there are divorce papers lying in her cupboard. It is all but over and then he convinces her to stay back for the trip. They go to the gas chamber together where Jews were killed with inhuman monstrosity. At this time Tiwari intervenes to convince us that the married couple standing at the cusp of separation are also going through a similar plight (“Every relationship goes through its own Auschwitz” remember?). The colour palette changes and people wearing gas masks fill the room. Nisha and Arjun, fully clothed, gasp for breath (why? You tell me) till the scene ends with her having a fit. He melts. I cannot think of another film that diminished a condition and a tragedy in one sweep.

The problems with a film like Bawaal are plenty (least of them being the lead actors having no chemistry). A gag involving a Gujarati family is stretched too far, Dhawan’s really fine comic timing is wasted, that Ajay took the trip to teach is forgotten by all, and the female character is written as someone who subliminally judges herself for having epilepsy harder than others do. But the most pressing issue is that it makes light of something that continues to be heralded as the biggest man-made disaster. There is a scene where the impending transformation of Dhawan’s character is conveyed by a black and white moment where he imagines himself to be a Jew told by a Nazi officer to pack his things. He only has one briefcase to spare. He begins taking his T-shirts and expensive watches till he removes them and puts his parents’ and Nisha’s photographs. It is such a dastardly recreation of a tragedy that it reveals Tiwari’s intent of evoking genocide only to transmute it as something regular like a relationship tussle.

I can envision a hundred sarcastic scenarios to justify how a film like Bawaal came into being. But frankly it is impossible to comprehend that it really got made, that the written draft went through a series of people sitting in important positions, and everyone assumed it was okay to greenlight a project that parades stupidity as empathy and emotional myopia as egotistical short-sightedness.

Watch here. 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)