Dream Girl 2 Exemplifies Bollywood's Crass Use Of Cross Dressing

Hindi cinema is notoriously untrained in the art of empathy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the manner it treats life-altering journeys between gender brackets. Manik Sharma writes.

Ayushmann Khurrana in Dream Girl 2

AN abiding memory of ‘90s cinema, that highlights just how far or how near actors were willing to travel to break into the mould of the mainstream, is of Govinda, dressed in a hot pink sari singing, “Pehani kamariya pe sari, ke aayi ab aunty ki bari.” A couple of decades later, Ayushmann Khurrana — an actor who takes himself more seriously — cross dresses his way to a handful of punchlines and jokes in Dream Girl 2. Decades apart but tied by the same old syntax, Khurrana’s film invokes humour in an infuriatingly familiar tone. The joke is at the expense of the woman (Pooja) that Khurrana’s Karam temporarily becomes, as opposed to the cocksure man he otherwise struts around as. Ironically, even in the hands of a supposedly woke actor, supposedly cognizant of social interpretations of his work, there is little to write or say about what this latest act of grabbing a low-hanging fruit adds to our understanding of gender. In fact, it might have done the opposite.

Crossdressing has, as is predictable of mainstream Hindi cinema, been used as a comedic device for decades. The sight of a man, dressed as a woman, is a masculine joke attired in the loud, colourful notes of a feminine piece of clothing. The structure might suggest the punchline trains its eyes on the man, but really it is his transformation to a woman, a thing unbecoming of a “him” per se, that we are asked to laugh at. The framing of crossdressing as a device of horror, on the other hand, indicates our suspicion of the spectrum that gender has always stood for. A spectrum that seems to evoke whimsically naive ideas, when its journeys originate in a man’s body. Tune it to comedic dalliances, a bit of cosplay for effect, and you can laugh, but assign it some sort of complex interiority, or even a tone of resentment or contemplation – Sadak or Sangharsh – and you are expected to recoil in horror. A woman becoming a man in comparison is considered lesser of a cultural antiquity.

To argue that crossdressing is a harmless social experiment is missing the point of who gets to dictate its interpretative guidelines. Our understanding of societal burden ought to educate our humour better. The fact that women rarely get to cross dress to dramatic, comic or even horrifying effect, asserts our cluelessness about the female form, and our contrived suspicions of it. It’s eerie to think that in the same story, men treat women as a romantic conquest and their bodies as the sight of physical comedy. Think of Laxmii Golmaal, and so many more. It’s like committing sacrilege at the very place where you claim to also be your pilgrimage. Perhaps the only film that wishes to say something meaningful with it is Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar.

Hindi cinema is notoriously untrained in the art of empathy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the manner it treats life-altering journeys between gender brackets as some sort of comedic cocoon or hellish nightmare that people either casually sport or poisonously suffer from. The latter might still be true to an extent but it has rarely been articulated with the delicateness it demands. It’s even more discouraging when new-age actors sign up for roles they deem as ticks on a long checklist of ‘brave choices’, rather than characters they would, ideally, identify through mutual vulnerabilities. Which makes the sight of a crossdressing man being stalked, chased and implored by benevolent but ultimately toxic suitors — the most common thread connecting the comedies — that much more chastening to contemplate. You’d think a film in 2023 would want to comment on it, let alone become the proof that this trope remains as problematic as it also refuses to age.

In Dream Girl 2 Khurrana goes beyond the first film to not only mimicking the voice of a woman, but also dressing up as one. The narrative device of this film feels so weak that it actually pales in comparison to the emotional motivations of Aunty No 1 and Chachi 420, each based on a similar central fulcrum — the idea of a dire man dressing up as a woman as a last resort. In fact, compared to the other two, Khurrana’s film feels like an excuse to get the actor into a sari so he can flaunt another quirk masked as a trademark creative whim. Another of those films where the celebrated actor does ‘something different’. Whereas this is a film that does exactly the same thing — some things worse in fact — that Hindi cinema’s most infamous but dubiously popular ruses has yielded with some amount of consistency. It’s neither empathetic to the fragile place a woman’s body can socio-politically represent, nor aware of the perspective, or even the strength that point-of-view ought to translate to. Instead it obsesses about flaccid, manly jokes about chest-supporting oranges and the euphemistic difference between ‘gaana’ and ‘bajaana’. It’s two steps back. Three, if you consider the actor doing it.

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