Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Tiku Weds Sheru fails to live up to the promise of its own ideas

Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Avneet Kaur in director Sai Kabir's Tiku Weds Sheru, streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

In the opening sequence of Amazon Prime Video’s Tiku Weds Sheru, a petite, young woman is speaking to a man in a restaurant. A man stops by their table as the woman gets up, supposedly awed by his masculine charms. It’s Nawazuddin Siddiqui, with dreamy, carefree perms, his skin aglow in the focused light and an oversized pair of sunglasses sitting atop his nose. It’s the hero’s entry - except we are soon told, Sheru is not the hero of this film set, but merely an extra who jovially, at times cockily, starts to behave like the male lead. It’s a neat setup, to suggest that those who have stood by lead actors all these years have been cinematically culled from the notion of love and romance itself. The un-fancied, and probably the conventionally uncharismatic, have love stories to tell too. This, in a sense, is Siddiqui’s own story - and yet with that fascinating riposte at the head, the film manically chases a tail that is both preposterous and unbecoming of the acting prowess on offer.

Directed by Sai Kabir, Tiku Weds Sheru follows Sheru, a small-time pimp in Mumbai, who also happens to be obsessed with the movies. He doesn’t so much express this obsession with cinema as he acts it out for people around him. In one scene, for example, he cheerfully hands over the papers of his tiny apartment to a bunch of goons asking for their money back. It hints at the man’s poetic aspirations that are never really built upon in the way most obsessions are. It basically comes and goes. Sheru is in debt, hopelessly dreamy and stuck in a job that seems less about his character and more about leveraging Siddiqui’s acting history. He is a reluctant pimp, who can’t help but be affectionate towards the women he transacts with. Again, an interesting detail that though invoked is never quite prodded with a studious gaze.

Sheru needs money for which he agrees to marry small-town girl Tiku, a brash, young Avneet Kaur who also happens to have filmy aspirations of her own. Sheru brings Tiku and her younger sister to millennium city where the two discover harsh untruths about each other, before realizing that the many ways the two are broken, are what actually make them whole. On paper, this isn’t the worst narrative to follow, considering the initial conceit is spelled out for everyone as the lesser-traced story of the supporting character – a role Siddiqui somewhat played in Ritesh Batra’s Photograph.

In Kabir’s film, however, the kernel of truth, so ecstatically laid out at the start, is quickly forgotten. Sheru is nothing if not the unrushed, quiet version of the hero, albeit with a slightly acerbic tongue. Tiku, on the other hand, is nothing if not one of the many roles that made Kangana Raut a star (she is also the producer here). And the story is nothing more than a confused mess of noir and romance, pulpy humour that fails to sustain or comment on showbiz’s corruption that struggles to rise above the skeletal form of provocation.

It’s hard to fault Siddiqui for trying to fit into boots most would consider him unfit for, and yet there is this weight of his many gangster roles that seeps into the texture of the film. He moons at the camera like a love-struck teenager but also casually spits dialogue that belongs in some of his more gritty films. Sheru is employed with mafia dons who seem to exist on the canvas of the story to ensure that none of Siddiqui’s acting heritage is forgotten, should, you know, this experiment stutter at the sight of a challenge. It screams lack of conviction, and it upsets the rhythm of a story that maybe could have been about a middle-aged man trying his last hand at some sort of dreamy climax – if not the films he wanted to do, then at least the life that having love in your life, stands for in them.

Again, there is plenty to chew on in the premise, but the film quite simply fails to exact from Siddiqui the kind of pathos that he can probably summon in his sleep. Instead, it tries to lazily cushion his rough exterior with weak, syrupy details like him living a cat called Elizabeth, a colourful wardrobe and the cocksure tenacity to, at one point, do the Salsa. To which effect, the bizarre climax never quite lands the way the filmmakers hope it would.

Tiku Weds Sheru feels like a missed opportunity, because rather than becoming a comment on our cinema’s obsession with fair and handsome men, it derails into a sort of exploration of dogged dreams built on the pillars of infatuation. Unfortunately, Siddiqui’s trademark style of nonchalance bends the film to his will, where it becomes a story trying its best to hold onto scars while also struggling to weep for them. Even in the moments when Siddiqui and Kaur do, it’s hard to tell if they are committedly devastated or merely extracting humour at the expense of the industry’s depravity. Such are the tonal clashes in a film that probably knew what it wanted to be when it started, before turning into an artwork that feels like a jigsaw of different schools of thought, let alone shades.

Tiku Weds Sheru dropped on Amazon Prime Video on June 23, 2023.