Badri’s brother was prevented by his class-obsessed conservative cliché of a father from marrying the woman he loves. Like Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (2014), to which this is a sequel in spirit, Shashank Khaitan’s film examines how the emotional reverberations of failed and thwarted marriages are felt by the entire family over time.
Vaidehi’s mad for 20 seconds, and then the focus shifts to Badri’s hurt feelings. You’d think this would wreck their relationship forever-not to mention result in some sort of legal action-but no. Badri, along with a friend, abducts Vaidehi off the streets at night, throws her in the trunk of his car, and drives off. If the pass the film grants him is morally dodgy, the sequence that arrives a little after the interval is indefensible. She says “no", he hears “try harder" -a sequence of events that’s stubbornly lodged in the DNA of Hindi cinema. Jhansi boy Badri (Varun Dhawan) blithely pursues the uninterested but amused Vaidehi (Alia Bhatt) through the streets of Kota. The latter occurs after the interval, and is usually a prelude to the male lead discovering the error of his ways.īadrinath Ki Dulhania has good and bad stalking, and both are presented as part of the mating ritual.
The former usually takes place in the film’s first hour, is performed with non-threatening charm by the male lead, and is borne by the female lead with exasperated good humour.
Stalking is so common in Hindi cinema that our filmmakers have developed a tacit grammar of good stalking versus bad.