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Package deal ka punchnama

Updated on: 12 June,2011 07:12 AM IST  | 
Paromita Vohra | paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

Friends discouraged me with dire warnings about sexism, from seeing Pyaar ka Punchnama

Package deal ka punchnama

Friends discouraged me with dire warnings about sexism, from seeing Pyaar ka Punchnama. I watched it with a frequently-jilted male friend, who never takes my stellar romantic advice. Throughout the film I kept rounding on him, "See how you behave? Serves them right -- and serves you right too, for choosing women like this." By the time Liquid paid the beauty salon bill for the woman who loves to glam herself up for another man I was groaning and cursing various stupid men friends whose cyclical tales of bad love I've endured while enriching the Bar Owners Association.


A still from Pyaar ka Punchnama, a film that follows the lives of three
men in manipulative relationships


Pyaar ka Punchnama follows the romantic lives of three young men involved with women, who manipulate and betray them. Finally, revolting against abuse, they liberate themselves from the oppressive shackles of coupledom, finding refuge and domestic happiness in friendship. A neat little feminist schematic -- though primitive -- if I ever saw one.

Never mind that a similar film about women would have branded them man-hating shrews. Personally I'm always interested when a film presents male protagonists with inner lives, rather than strutting stereotypes of masculinity.

The men in this film are foolish and vulnerable, struggling to make sense of love and relationships. The women in the film are somewhat flat -- representing only their particular demerit (controlling, crazy, cold). Are there women like the women in the film? Alas, too many. But the film seems reluctant to accept that there are other kinds of women as well.

PKP is written with a certain accuracy. It's funny because it's cruelly true. This helps unveil, without trying, bits of the unstated context the characters operate in -- the drudgery of corporate jobs, supposedly offset by the joys of coupledom.

Yet that particular coupledom seems to exist only to support the corporate edifice -- through the endless consumption of cushions, curtains and talktime. The woman living with her boyfriend keeps referring to the risk she's taken by "living-in", reflecting the constant anxiety women feel about men's default slotting of women as respectable, hence marriageable or sexually easy, therefore to be discarded.

The accuracy of observation, unencumbered by political correctness, prevents the film from being purposefully sexist. Then suddenly, it loses steam. The aimlessness of its second half is rooted in denial.

Once disappointed by romance, the guys, and the film with them, can't seem to get past the all-women-are-bitches chorus. We can indulge this for a few scenes, but eventually, you expect them to move on, in the interests of storytelling; to ask themselves some questions. Why do they repeatedly choose such women -- moderately pretty but not uniquely attractive, professional but lacking ambition, "outgoing" but fixated on male attention? Perhaps most men, reconstituted or misogynistic, don't feel threatened by women who buy into the notion that keeping a man is central to a successful female life. Why don't these men choose other kinds of women, who have more going on in their lives and their heads and don't want manipulative relationships?

But, if the writer let these men ask such questions of themselves, they might be forced to see which part of the problem they are. And change. And then change the way they see women and then, the women they see.

Is this fear of self-knowledge, sexism, or just a limitation? Some might say the two are a package deal, a married couple. You can't seem to get one without the other. Still, having spoken up a little, the film makes me wonder if a different time might yet come. Boys who do cry, often turn a corner and find the plot.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with
fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at
www.parodevi.com.


The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.




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