In Super Subbu, Mallik Ram reveals himself to be a consumer of garbage reels and memes, which becomes evident in his outmoded sense of humor. Sample the following: a remote stops working as soon as a condom advertisement starts playing on the TV; a husband buys an iPhone for his wife by selling his kidney; and "Study Material" is the name of the folder in which porn videos are stored on a pen drive. These are the kinds of jokes teenagers tell each other while giggling sheepishly, reveling in their juvenile bawdiness. A movie like Welcome to the Jungle references other scenes and films to wink at the audience—to make them point their fingers at the screen like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme borrowed from Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Ram wants to achieve a similar effect with his unoriginal, long-stale jokes, which is why you get bits like the iPhone-kidney one and the "Study Material" one.
But perhaps the bigger problem with Ram is that he throws too many things at the wall without sticking any of them with flair or competence. He's an ideas guy. He inflates Super Subbu with a premise of sex education, along with remnants of boy-girl romance. The show touches on the stigma surrounding actors and prostitutes, the exploitation of aspiring actors by directors, unwanted pregnancy and abortion, and the ways men define their masculinity through their libido. All of these elements function as social messages wrapped in a package of third-rate gags. Ram leaves these concepts half-baked; instead of gradually and logically developing them, he scatters them haphazardly, hoping his "humor" will conceal his ineptness. After attending just one session with Subbu Sir (Sundeep Kishan), three or four women learn the "no means no" principle and wield it against their horny husbands. These women have been living in the patriarchal village of Makhipur for years. Even if they aren't happy being treated as sex objects by their husbands, what Subbu tells them should strike them as extremely radical. It's not something people in their position could adopt overnight.
Those three or four women spread the "no means no" stance to the other women, but Ram doesn't show that conversation, which would likely have been marked by tense arguments. Instead, he merely implies that they all swiftly adopted the idea, and that night, every woman denies her husband sex. For Ram, this is a funny, simplistic scene. He omits any trace of opposition or violence from the men who see their wives as sex toys. He's more interested in landing the punchline through the shot of disappointed men sitting in the dark, mourning the pleasure they couldn't claim. How does this "no means no" policy affect husband-wife relationships in the village? What change does it bring to the rural domestic space? How significantly does it alter the power equation? In one of the episodes, a man and a woman attend a couple's therapy session, after which the woman teaches the man how to make love to her, how to hold her hand. The man clearly experiences something different, and word about the benefits of couples therapy spreads through the village. However, Ram again fails to disclose how these sessions impact everyone else. What behavioral changes do they bring about in these relationships, and how much time do the residents of Makhipur take to adapt to them? We don't get the scene where the men and women—either individually or together as a group—discuss the positive (or negative) impact of Subbu's lessons.
As far as Ram is concerned, these moments are simply boxes to be ticked off—quite literally, given that Subbu crosses agenda items off his list with chalk on the blackboard. Topics like family planning, birth control, and couples therapy are completed in a quick montage. For a while, you get the impression that Subbu, like Otis in Sex Education, will use his knowledge to help characters in trouble, but Ram abandons this notion almost as quickly as he introduces it. It's ironic that a series that wants to normalize conversations about sex—that wants to present them as a natural part of human existence to be handled with maturity—is itself executed with a puerile tone, complete with jokes like the one where two men go to a prostitute's house with a wedding proposal, generating double entendres and confusion. It's also bewildering that this sex education show reinforces the childish notion that virgins are losers and non-virgins—or men with high sexual endurance—are studs or idols. This thinking is never challenged. And you can't entirely blame Subbu's own ignorance or mindset for the tone, considering he's depicted as someone who understands bodily and sex-related matters; he even speaks sensitively about sanitary pads and periods.
Just what kind of series did Ram want to make here? His approach is all scattershot—Super Subbu is an awkward, mortifying clutter. When Subbu first arrives at Makhipur, a woman stares at him with a suggestive smile. She later appears at a temple out of nowhere and offers him a coin for his prayer. It's here that you begin to wonder whether this woman is a supernatural entity and whether only Subbu can see her. Ram plants this possibility in your mind only to fall back on a stupid, half-baked twist, which shouldn't really come as a surprise by this point in the show. Also, Subbu and Divya's (Manasa Chowdary) relationship isn't convincingly developed enough to elicit genuine concern for them. I was surprised by Ram's confidence—he expects us to be moved by the ups and downs of this artificial romance. What Ram has are two or three passable one-line jokes, such as the one where kerosene is mistaken for Crocin or when a wife threatens to hang herself from a table fan. Super Subbu, otherwise, is precisely the opposite of super. It bores you to death.
Final Score - [2/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times