CAST : Dhanush, Sara Ali Khan, Akshay Kumar
BLUF
On a trip to Siwan in Bihar, Vishwanathan Iyer a.k.a. Vishu (Dhanush) – a Tamilian medical student is abducted and married under duress to Rinku Sooryavanshi (Sara Ali Khan) whose grandmother (Seema Biswas) wants to get rid of the girl. Once out of the clutches of her violent family, Rinku tells Vishu that she already has a boyfriend called Sajjad Ali Khan (Akshay Kumar) with whom she had attempted to run away several times. Vishu informs her that he is due to be engaged to his girlfriend Mandy in Chennai with both parents’ blessings in just a few days.
THE MEAT AND THE POTATOES
Groom abductions and pakdau/jabariya weddings are the norms in Bihar. This propels the story into its core plot as the theme of Atrangi Re is actually more to do with PTSD-triggered trauma and hallucinations.
The plot weaves on the veneer of trauma and mental health and takes a quirky approach to delineate mental health.
IN THE KNOW
If you have watched Rai and Sharma’s earlier work, you know the stories are committed to falling immediately in the deep end of the emotion of love. The one that small-town stories are based on, where there is no complicated emotion, and love is a Mills and Boon fantasy with all the commitment.
So Vishu tells Rinku quite quickly that he may be falling in love with her, but in Tamil, which is something she is impervious to because she has devils of her own to overcome.
A.R. Rahman’s music fills in the right crevices and some of the songs are classic catchy.
Dhanush and Akshay are experienced and cakewalk their way through their roles. Sara has the meat in the story. The body, accent, and mannerism transformation for her is a lot of work done and one must commend the effort with which she pulls off Rinku.
The story is medically weak since it deals with a medical condition. It is an important movie for starting the conversation about trauma and mental health but a little more research into therapy and treatment could have made it a tad bit more credible.
Now that we are talking about it, maybe using the same parameters to define classic imbalanced behavior for characters shown in Indian cinema and television (the Komolikas, Aarohis, Jasmines, Manushis, Nirmala Devis, Kuhu, etc ) may help write better character arcs for the stories.
WHAT WE LOVED
Sara
Music
WHAT WE MISSED
Medical research.about Mental Health
