Mere Husband Ki Biwi Is The Poor(ly Written) Cousin Of Tu Jhoothi Main Makkar

REPEAT AFTER ME: quirky film titles do not equate to a good comedy film; an interestingly different airport climax scene does not justify the rest of the film’s utter lack of originality. These were the first two thoughts that popped into my head after watching Arjun Kapoor, Bhumi Pednekar and Rakul Preet Singh’s latest film Mere Husband Ki Biwi. I have to admit, the general (lack of) buzz around the film — barring a rehash of a popular old song that’s gone viral — got me predicting that I was going to dedicate 2.5 hours of my day to watch a doomed film, and I would have to fight to stay awake. I can admit that I was wrong. Mere Husband Ki Biwi is not atrocious. It’s just plain ol’ mid.

Here’s another surprising revelation I had. Arjun Kapoor…isn’t a bad actor? Dude has screen presence and can pull off comedy. I actually found myself laughing out loud at a few scenes in the film, which I don’t think anyone expected. Just before the climax began, a few people in the theatre I was in started to walk away having signed off on the film. But as soon as the airport scene began, they paused, standing at the door of the theatre, and watched the entire climax play out. Full marks to Mudassir Aziz and team for having at least one scene in the film that sparked intrigue, because the rest of it was honestly boring and done to death.

Ankur Chadha (Arjun Kapoor), an average Delhi munda marries the love of his life Prabhleen Dhillon (Bhumi Pednekar), a feisty Punjabi aspiring journalist, but once they start to live together, the cracks begin to show. Many fights later, they decide to get a divorce. Ankur moves on and finds Antara Khanna (Rakul Preet Singh) at a chance encounter (for those of you who are aware of the viral paragliding meme — “mein m****c*** hoon” — their meet-cute is a direct lift of it) and fall in love. Unfortunately, Prabhleen meets with an accident, resulting in retrograde amnesia. She’s forgotten the last five years of her life and still believes she’s married to Ankur. What follows is a situational comedy on how Ankur balances between the two women in his life.

There’s a Luv Ranjan hangover to the writing of the film, and not in a good way. The only difference here is that in Tu Jhoothi Main Makkar the hero’s best friend is played by yet another Punjabi/Jaat guy (Anubhav Singh Bassi), but in Mere Husband Ki Biwi dares to make the hero’s best friend a Muslim character (Harsh Gujral playing Rehaan Qureshi). But not without adding corresponding quips to the dialogue, where in one scene Rehaan says, “minority hoon, bhai.”

Mudassar Aziz’s last outing Khel Khel Mein wasn’t half-bad and has some interesting scenes and performances. Mere Husband Ki Biwi has an interesting premise but the entire team is so obsessed with making a “hit film” that the mainstream-isation of the story becomes borderline nauseating. The end result is a generic Hindi film, made for predominantly North Indian audiences obsessed with anything remotely Bollywood. And they make no effort to hide this aspect. The formulaic nature of the film is quite on-the-nose.

I have to admit that all three leads in the film — Arjun, Bhumi and Rakul Preet are quite easy on the eye. They took their assignments seriously and delivered the best they could in every scene. Bhumi, who is easily the most talented of the lot, gets the worst end of the stick in terms of character development because they — quite literally — make her into a witch/daayan and use horror film beats to explain that she’s the ex-wife. The less said about character development the better. Most of the characters that populate the film are flat and one-dimensional. Harsh Gujaral stands out in terms of dialogue delivery but it angers me that Bollywood is using influencers so blatantly as a marketing tool. And therefore, I’m on the fence about whether he was a worthy addition to the film or not.

I’m just glad we’ve come to a point in our mainstream Hindi film industry where divorce and remarriage isn’t looked at as an end of the world-level tragedy. We’re finally making comedies about the topic, maybe next time we can hope for a good comedy?