Doctor G review | Bollywood's gynaecology lesson is banal

A still from the film Doctor G

Two things terrify and freeze Dr Uday Gupta (Ayushmann Khurrana), a freshly-graduated MBBS in pursuit of a post-graduation seat in orthopaedics: women, and women’s body parts. No wonder then that in Anubhuti Kashyap’s medical drama Doctor G, Uday lands a gynaecology MD in Bhopal. For the man choking in his own ideas of masculinity and an ego-puncturing romantic failure behind him, this is an insult, a tragedy and a sacrifice. He chooses gynaecology because the seat is in Bhopal, where his mother (Sheeba Chaddha), a single woman seeking quick internet fame and a single man appropriate for her age, lives. After he joins the team of Dr Nandini (Shefali Shah), an upright, fair and stern gynaecologist who runs a class of post-graduates under her in the government hospital she works in, a group of hardworking and fussy women doctors surround Uday, including Dr Fatima (Rakul Preet Singh) engaged to her boyfriend.

So Uday is in a soup. The film, written by Kashyap herself, Sumit Saxena, Saurabh Bharat and Vishal Wagh is meant to be the transformative story of a man who is confused about his own ideas of masculinity and has the tendency to blame the women in his life for his every misstep — and there are many of those. How does this man lose the “man’s touch” and learn to touch a woman’s vagina like a doctor? How does he uphold a woman’s right to a safe abortion, learn to wholeheartedly accept an efficient woman as his boss and let go of his pre-conditioned and dyed-in-the-wool male ego? How does he learn to accept a woman as his friend and not a girlfriend after he has kissed her?

A still from the film

It’s a promising kernel of an idea gone haywire with a dissipated screenplay completely out of touch with reality. Gynaecology as a medical field has many male practitioners — being one of the most lucrative medical streams for students, gynaecology is never short of aspiring students in any medical college around the world. An MBBS doctor is never at a loss for a physical exam, no matter what orifice of the human body she or he has to examine. Doctor G’s protagonist dreads the vaginal opening and when he does the first time, the patient’s husband beats him up because a male doctor dares to touch his wife’s privates. If anything, Doctor G has unintended shock value galore. When a married brother Uday looks up to an orthopaedic doctor no less and seeks his help in the risky abortion of his under-18 lover, it becomes a forced springboard for Uday’s transformation.

Khurrana carries off the role with enough confidence — he has an easy, boy-next-door quality we’ve become accustomed to seeing. But with a half-baked screenplay that tries too hard to be a pulp of many genres, Khurrana’s performance in Doctor G is among his most uninspired. His character grows up, but the actor has the same pitch and tone until the last scene. Singh is vanilla when she tries to be outspoken and bold, jarring when she has vulnerable moments. Shah and Chaddha give their roles a signature each. But none of the performances can save the screenplay’s mountain of clichés, collapsing on each other, building up to a shaky and melodramatic climax. Technically too, the film lacks cinematic flourish, framed more like a ’90s TV serial.

Bollywood’s gynaecology lesson doesn’t shy away from showing blood — bravo! — but the entire department and its doctors only have one kind of emergency: How soon and well to deliver babies? By the time Uday is ready to immerse himself in vaginal examinations, Doctor G has lost all steam as a film experience, mired in mixed messages about the most perfunctory of gender roles: A man understanding a woman.