Bawaal film review: Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor can’t rescue this ill-conceived travelogue

Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor in Bawaal, streaming on Amazon Prime Video. (Screen grab)

Perhaps no other film in recent memory represents the vexing tonal clash that Prime Video’s Bawaal has with its subject material. Going by the name, you’d think this is a small-town film about small fights and larger ideological battles. Instead, Bawaal veers into ridiculous territory that in places even becomes problematic and insulting. In one scene, Nisha, played by Janhvi Kapoor, translates a World War 2 survivor who says something to the effect of “Har relationship apne Auschwitz se guzarta hai.” This gross, frankly insensitive appropriation of a genocide to underline some mawkish point about love and marriage is borderline mindless. To which effect, Bawaal is anything but its name or its acting talent’s worth. It’s a farcical premise, straining hard to jacket a coming-of-age story that ends up becoming a socio-political abomination.

Bawaal tells the story of Ajay, a Lucknow-residing narcissist, who is so committed to maintaining his image that he keeps his wife Nisha, at arm’s length - quite literally, because they take turns sleeping on the bed. Ajju bhaiya, has a signature enabler - a friend who worships him - and a coterie of people who cheer for him from the margins of his myth. Ironically, Ajay is also a primary school history teacher, but knows nothing about teaching or history. He is, in essence, a walking-talking advertisement about all that he can be. “Mahaul aisa bnao ye logon ko sirf mahaul yaad rahe,” he claims in front of his friend, who struggles to separate the image of him from his actual self. On the face of it, this is a fairly straightforward story, where Ajju would finally stumble upon an epiphany, realize the kind of bigot he is and overcome that short-sightedness to leap into the arms of a woman he has crudely distanced himself from. Except, Bawaal has other dastardly and silly ideas up its sleeves.

In a fit of anger Ajju slaps a student who turns out to be the local MLA’s son. Put under official review, his masterplan to save his job is to, get this, travel to Europe to teach the history of WW2 from the very sites of those catastrophic events. Even if you buy into that head-scratching pivot, you’d have to wonder why the makers couldn’t choose something more modest, or closer home. Is this simply an excuse to, a la '90s, take a foreign trip and spit out a film at the end of it? Because that is precisely what Bawaal begins to feel like, as you retreat to the back of your seat, dumbfounded and somewhat disinclined to buy into the ostentatiousness of it all. Nisha joins Ajju on the trip as he relays lectures about WW2 back to his students in Lucknow from Normandy, Paris and other cities from his phone, while also gradually falling for the woman he has dehumanized to an extent. This, by the way, is not the immersive Edtech idea we need. War as a grooming tool for personal growth feels like a far-fetched idea, but so committed are the director (Nitesh Tiwari) and writer (and wife Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari) that they drag it to absurd, at times confusing lengths.

In a scene, a walkthrough of Anne Frank’s home leads to a session of binge-drinking between the two protagonists. In another, Ajay refers to war as ‘bawaal’, an insensitive allegory that unfortunately headlines a film wanting to extract gummy life lessons from the darkest period in world history. The film’s grammar, its tonal inconsistencies make it impossible to specify exactly which half of its kamikaze structure is actually undermining it the most – the war between two people or the actual world war.

This self-destructive, thoughtless politics of the film aside, the performances by Dhawan and Kapoor are commendable. Dhawan is in trademark form, easily welding himself to a script that though it allows him to flex - quite literally - his comedic muscle doesn’t quite offer him the scenery of much else. Kapoor is consistent but rarely urged to do anything but look subdued. The two give it a shot, but are hamstrung by a plotline that devolves into a creative disaster of its own making.

Popular notion suggests that the Hindi romance as a genre is dying. Recent films like SatyaPrem Ki Katha echo the shift that Hindi cinema has to consider so it can root its romances in places of serious, moral conflict. Though Bawaal imitates a similar structure, where a woman must play the victimized bend that a man can gradually flow past to arrive at the shore of clarity, it erects more issues than it defuses. It’s hard to imagine the logline for a film that wants to use war as therapy, and yet Bawaal is so messily devoted to its suicidal mission, it offends by way of both design and texture. At one point the film elaborately advertises pre-cooked Indian food packets manufactured by a popular FMCG brand. The kind of point where you can feel a sense of guilt and shame, having participated in a cynical ride that wants to mine epoch-defining trauma for a lathery, romantic epilogue. No amount of small-town, goofy charm can rescue such a misadventure.

Bawaal is now streaming on PrimeVideo.