It's a pure stroke of luck that two movies about intercaste relationships have been released in the same week. One of them is Pulkit's Kartavya, and the other is Pati Patni Aur Woh Do, written and directed by Mudassar Aziz. If Pulkit's film is a mirror that smugly reflects its virtues back at its audience, Aziz's rom-com is a cocktail of chaos and lowbrow comedy. The two movies are very different tonally: Pulkit is all dark and grim, while Aziz is so laid-back and cheeky that he makes fun of issues generally considered dark and grim. The intercaste relationship is merely Aziz's starting point. He uses it as a springboard to poke fun at infidelity, corruption, homophobia, and politics. In one scene, the police chase couples out of a park, and in another, an officer asks for a bribe from a man for hugging his fiancée in his car in public. The movie is set in Prayagraj and frequently moves to Varanasi. If one were feeling pretentiously intellectual, one could say something like, "The system, the politics, the society—all are so absurd and run by people who cling to this absurdity with such sincerity that everything becomes inherently funny. Aziz has merely made the comical aspects explicit."
Sure, Aziz wants to make some Important Points, which he does in the end—in the style of a typical Ayushmann Khurrana message movie—but that scene is Pati Patni Aur Woh Do's lowest point. Simply put, Aziz looks quite inept when he shoves big statements into this fluffy comedy. Thankfully, Pati Patni Aur Woh Do has its merits. The first and foremost among them are the distinct accents the characters speak in. They all possess unique, quirky voices that separate them individually while uniting them comically. You can close your eyes and distinguish between Aparna (Wamiqa Gabbi), Nilofer (Rakul Preet Singh), and Chanchal (Sara Ali Khan). Each actor has a personal vocal note, a distinct lilt. I especially liked Singh. She is slowly revealing herself to be more talented than the eye-candy roles she has been generally offered since her debut movie. You can't help but wonder how severely she has been underused. I first glimpsed her capabilities in De De Pyaar De 2. What mostly lay dormant in that film, itching to break free, comes excitingly to the surface here. Singh's cartoonish voice in Pati Patni Aur Woh Do is adorable and strangely melodic. Her vocal charms are matched by explosive expressions that render her a petite baddie.
Khurrana, as forest officer Prajapati Pandey, effortlessly handles cheetahs and wolves but is barely able to keep himself composed once he starts lying to Aparna, his wife. Khurrana is expectedly fine in this zone. With all his facial exaggerations and comical exertions, he still manages to look like more than just a live-action emoji. Aziz assembles his live-action cartoons to build something amusingly chaotic. He simply wants to make you laugh, so, by keeping Prajapati at the center, he piles misunderstanding upon misunderstanding until they all crash loudly into one another during the climactic scene. Aziz is so forceful and works at such a high pitch that you eventually find yourself laughing a little at his mad schemes. It helps that he casts Ayesha Raza Mishra as a talkative Bua Ji, further increasing the volume of the film.
Once you stop laughing, though, you begin to wonder why Aziz didn't poke holes in the saintly veneer of Prajapati. When he and Chanchal unknowingly drink an adulterated beverage, they sing and dance in their intoxicated state like two people physically attracted to one another. And just before the interval, Nilofer falls into Prajapati's arms while adjusting her sari, and both seem lost in each other's eyes. Aziz, however, doesn't follow through on these implications. He stops himself from turning Prajapati into a flawed human being who, while maintaining a lie, slowly begins living it as reality. The roots of Pati Patni Aur Woh Do lie in the realm of sex comedy—it occasionally plays out like a male fantasy, as when Chanchal forces Prajapati to kiss her or sits on his lap insistently. Aziz, however, is equally insistent on maintaining a "clean" sensibility. This creates a clash between what the movie naturally wants to be and what Aziz forces it to become. He neuters all the sharp, smutty edges. His concerns seem tilted more toward box-office safety than comic honesty. The final product, then, is not quite so satisfying. Aziz, by cheating on his material's true nature, commits his own infidelity.
Final Score - [3.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times