To go from watching Assi one day to watching Do Deewane Seher Mein the next is... something else. The former deals with a dark, uncomfortable subject, while the latter is breezy and lightweight. The former rains down on you incessantly like a storm with thunder, while the latter is akin to an orange candy whose taste, while somewhat pleasing in the moment, disappears after a few minutes. Assi sits on a rough edge between reality and fiction. DDSM (change the first letter to "B," and you will enter a different realm altogether), on the other hand, is complete, sugar-coated fiction. This is the sort of film that shows us a woman who looks like Mrunal Thakur feeling awkward about the shape of her nose and how it affects her face. In Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, the voiceover winks at the audience at one point, saying that Margot Robbie is the wrong choice if you want to make a point about her character not feeling very pretty. One simply has to replace "Margot Robbie" with "Mrunal Thakur" to apply the same line to DDSM.
But writer Abhiruchi Chand and director Ravi Udyawar keep a straight face. Perhaps this is their way of making a statement like, "Hey, even a gorgeous woman like Mrunal Thakur can feel insecure in a society that has superficial beauty standards." It's an interesting concept that, unfortunately, never becomes convincing in DDSM. The reason is pretty simple: Thakur, even through an objective lens, is physically beautiful. It's difficult to grasp what exactly she finds wrong with her nose or her face. And I laughed when I learned that mere eyeglasses somehow turn Thakur's Roshni "ugly" and "inferior" to Naina (Sandeepa Dhar), her sister. You would have to rely on more than just big specs to present Thakur as plain as a pikestaff. Then again, DDSM is chock-full of more unbelievable details. This is, after all, a film in which Naina's husband apparently compares her to "a sick person" after seeing her thin body during a vacation. Only a blind person would make such a comment. And then there's also the fact that Dhar's so-called "sick patient-like" body resembles that of a sensuous, fetching model.
Chand and Udyawar might have made DDSM to tell us to embrace our imperfections, but watching people like Dhar and Thakur feel embarrassed about their appearance might make ordinary-looking mortals feel even more demotivated about their own physical features. I mean, Roshni's whole arc essentially is that she takes off her glasses in the end, and she is someone who, with or without glasses, looks stunning as hell. It's only fair to say, then, that the filmmakers miss their target, that they undermine their own message. All those references to and images of Zomato, Ixigo, and Wow! Momo don't do the film any favors; they render it a product-placement advertisement. I guess only Siddhant Chaturvedi's Shashank comes across as somewhat believable. He is afraid of speaking in front of crowds—in meetings, in public gatherings—because he has a "sha" problem. He pronounces "washing machine" as "wasing macine," "Roshni" as "Rosni," and so on (now you know why the word "seher" is there in the title). Shashank is smart, funny, and handsome. Notice his wit in the scene where he and Roshni talk for the first time on the terrace. That charm, that wittiness, evaporates when he faces an audience.
But there is a problem even here. A flashback informs us that Shashank, as a kid, was fearless. It didn't matter to him what others thought about his pronunciation. What changed? We get a clumsy explanation about adulthood, making one more aware of one's image, but this is a bland generalization, and it rings false, given how all the adults around him encourage him to be confident. Shashank's colleague and friend (Viraj Gehlani) warns him that the people in the office will eat him alive, but everyone turns out to be gentle, including the boss (Naveen Kaushik), who deletes Shashank's resignation letter without reading it because he trusts him too much. DDSM, then, is nothing but smooth sailing with occasional bumps that never put anything—or anyone—in real danger. No conflict feels like the end of the world, and no encounter threatens to break something incredibly precious. The tagline might as well be "No Sweat."
I was baffled by the film's decision not to do anything with Shashank's photography skills and Roshni's job as a content creator. There is an intersection between the two, which DDSM doesn't explore in any meaningful way. There isn't even a brief conversation between the characters about it. Given how Roshni spends her professional life photoshopping images and working alongside a cameraman who photographs models, I expected her to pick up Shashank's camera and talk to him about her perspective on beauty and composition. Chand and Udyawar seem oddly blind and clueless; it feels as if they haven't fully understood what they are working with—or what they themselves have written.
Shashank's father (Deepraj Rana) often expresses his disappointment that his son was unable to get into IIM. He also scoffs at him for not having a car and a permanent residence. Imagine a scenario where Shashank, frustrated by his father's demands, finally sets out to buy a flat and gets scammed by the builder. What could a story like that look like? Well, don't put too much pressure on your brain—for something similar, watch Gharaonda, directed by Bhimsain, which has the song that lends this movie its title. That 1977 drama is still painfully relevant; it's also a far better Mumbai film than DDSM.
Final Score- [3.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times