Director Seema Desai’s film about a elderly couple in the town of perfumes, Kannauj, trying to fob off the stink of decay in their 23-year-old marriage, has everything going for it: a solid cast, for one. Ashutosh Rana and Sheeba Chadha, two durable dependables of the entertainment world, struggle hard to overcome the listlessness at the heart of the plot.
Chaddha and Rana have their moments—how can they not?! But the projection of a fractured marriage remains largely frayed and feeble right to the predictable end.
Fine young actor Pavail Gulati plays the couple’s absentee son, Yug, who returns home to cement his parents’ splintered marriage. Gulati, too, pitches in with a sincere performance but fails to lift the end product from the morass of languorousness. Yug’s workplace and his friends at work seem like caricatures moonlighting as professionals.
There is no dearth of good intention in the awkwardly titled Kaushaljis Versus Kaushal. But one gets the sinking feeling that every component in the presentation, emotional and physical, is over-arranged. Even the bundles wrapped in red arranged at the back of the courtroom on steel almirahs look planted.
What the narrative lacks is spontaneity and flow. The screenplay and dialogues seem to have been written in a state of supreme intellectual turgidity. Everyone says the proper things. But it all sounds premeditated. There is this lengthy monologue in the courtroom by Sheeba Chadha in which she tells the judge about her husband’s kulfi fixation in their younger days. By the time she ends, I am sure the Judge must have fallen asleep.
This marriage should be dissolved on account of ennui. But, of course, that is not the way a sweet-tempered family film goes. Let’s suppose Alok Nath and Reema Lagoo faced some problems in their marriage in Hum…Aapke Hain Koun. Would they be allowed to go through that dreadful ‘D’ procedure? Meena (Chadha) and Baijnath (Rana) don’t know this, but they are puppets of societal norms. He wants to sing the Qawwali. She wants to manufacture ittar (perfume). So where does the dreadful ‘D’ word come in?
The well-meaning but stilted narrative knocks the bottom off its own premise—elderly couples have a right to seek happiness outside marriage—by working out a hurried compromise that leaves the female judge as stumped as we. In the end, it is the family that matters, and to hell with personal space.
Given the powerful lead actors, this film could have been another Hope Gap (the British film where an elderly couple decide to part ways after years of marriage). Instead, Kaushaljis Versus Kaushal looks at times like a pale shadow of Badhaai Ho (the father trying to impress his son’s girlfriend with his broken English). Most of the time, it seems as eager to score family points as an NGO film on family squabbling.
