Revisiting Bewakoofiyan starring Sonam Kapoor and Ayushmann Khurrana as Subhash K Jha reshines the light in the film that released in 2014 in a new installment of This Day That Year.
This is Delhi’s nouveau riche Gurugram, then known as Gurgaon, a world bathed in cosmetic conceit. Sonam Kapoor and Ayushmann Khurrana blend into this gleaming kingdom’s excesses effortlessly. The two of them are so good as a couple imagining them apart for even a portion of the bitterness that bites into the narrative during the second half becomes unbearable.
Debutant director Nupur Asthana’s is a bright, scrambled world of wealth and luxury and the yuppy club’s unstated desperation to move up the corporate ladder. It is also, by its very definition, a ridiculously self-important, delusional world.
Miraculously, this film, with its gleaming polished surfaces, neither gasps nor laughs at the ignobility of upward mobility.
There is an interestingly crafted fight scene between the film’s lead pair, in which Mayera reminds Mohit that she has not bought a new pair of shoes during the last two months because of his job loss. That she doesn’t realize how ridiculous she sounds to Mohit is a measure of the underlining irony that the narrative scrapes out of these characters while portraying the exacerbated materialism of the go-getting generation.
Habib Faisal’s writing is smart and amiable crowded with quaint colloquialisms culled from the Capital’s youngster’s language. The writing also surprises itself by becoming inwardly drawn and introspective at the most unexpected moments.
Khurrana looks like the guy next door who wouldn’t mind pulling a few strings to float higher than the level allotted to him by fate. Of course, it helps Khurrana that he has Rishi Kapoor to play his girlfriend’s hawk-like father. Rishi’s character of the IAS officer on the verge of retirement (with a companion from his workplace who typically offers his “humble” advice on every matter) is brilliantly written. Rishi’s Sehgal is a pompous name-thrower with an inflated sense of self-worth, over-possessive about his only daughter’s life and preferences; Rishi’s V K Sehgal is a striking image of a man on the verge of erupting into self-deprecatory laughter if he only he knew how funny his quirks look from the outside.
Rishi brings to the characters a cornucopia of ‘cool’. Seldom in his other recent films, except Do Dooni Chaar, has this brilliant actor expressed such pleasure in presenting his character’s point of view. It’s no coincidence that the film, too, was written by Faisal.
So many of Rishi Kapoor’s scenes with Khurrana stand tall because of the way the two characters meet as adversaries who, fortunately, love the same girl in different ways. Sonam, as the girl torn between an autocratic dad and an unreasonable lover, is so in character you wonder whether the role and its fetish for designer labels were written specially for Sonam.
Bewakoofiyan has nothing new to say. And that is its greatest virtue. It is Meet The Parents, where the father and the prospective son-in-law’s roles are better played than in the original. Yes, Kapoor and Khurrana are better than Robert de Niro and Ben Stiller, who were in the Hollywood film about the father of the bride.
The narrative sparkles with a mischievous elegance. The winking homage to the go-getting glam set of Delhi works mainly because the three protagonists are so immersed in the goings-on they make us forget that we’ve seen most of these conflicts over and over again in the past.
