Dhadak 2 movie review: A little group, sitting outside their tiny homes, is swapping stories. The tone is civil, but the matter at hand, clearly hypothetical, is deadly serious– about a group of starving humans turning into cannibals, and a victim who gets devoured. Someone says, ‘agar Dalit hota toh bach jaata, koi chhoota tak nahin’ (If it was a Dalit, no one would have touched him).
This line hits hard.
Or, it should have. But it stays a throwaway, and we don’t really feel the impact as much as we should have. That single dialogue encapsulates centuries of caste-discrimination and exploitation and the almost inhuman resilience that a group of Indian citizens have been forced to live with. But in Shazia Iqbal’s ‘Dhadak 2’, we hear it, and before we could absorb the enormous weight of it, it’s gone.
I felt the similarly torn while I watched the film (a spiritual sequel of the 2018 Ishaan Khatter-Jhanvi Kapoor ‘Dhadak’), where it can be seen reaching for emotional highs, and you will it with all your might to get there, and then along comes another speech-to-camera, another declarative dive, which undermines the moment, and the cumulative drama.
It is in the in-between moments that this adaptation of Mari Selvaraj’s ‘Pariyerum Perumal’ comes alive. Set in a city which looks like Bhopal but is never named, a law college becomes the site of the conflict, just the way it did in the 2018 original. Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Vidhi (Tripti Dimrii) are students in the same class, but there’s an invisible hawser-like line which divides them: he cannot even pronounce his surname ‘Ahirwar’ out loud because he will be ‘found out’ as lower caste, whereas she never has to, as she belongs to an ‘upper caste Brahmin’ family.
The film doesn’t draw back from scenes set in squalor, even if those visuals come wrapped in a Neelesh’s outburst as he ‘introduces’ Vidhi to his lived reality — look, that neighbour is a sweeper in homes, that one cleans gutters. We aren’t shown the people up close ; they are blurs in the distance. The Tamil original would have stayed on those faces till their outlines became clear, but the Dharma production’s focus is the attractive lead pair, artfully made up to look unmade : is that a slight hint of brownface on Neelesh?
A romance flowers between the two, but the passion feels a trifle performative. Coming off from ‘Saiyaara’ where the two young lovers burn up the screen, about the only really effective thing about that film, you feel this even more intensely. Individually, though, both make us watch, and in some places, Dimri more than Chaturvedi.
Does the clearly ‘privileged’ Vidhi (yes, writers Iqbal and Rahul Badwelkar make her use that word for herself) not realise the differences herself? There’s a lot of tell underlining the show : Neelesh’s initial helplessness at the constant gross humiliation heaped upon him –people literally pissing on him, muck being thrown at him– turning into the mantra of ‘maaro ya maro’, which finally becomes his only recourse.
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The instinct for survival kicking in, and the struggle for ceded space, is a reflection of the sentiments coursing through the veins of his mother (an effective Anubha Fatehpura) and college principal (Zakir Hussain). And Neelesh BA LLB at last finds himself arrayed on the side of his people, shown the way by a fighting-for-the-cause senior student, one spot on a front class bench, one push back at a time.
A couple of other threads crop up, crowding the canvas. A vigilante (Saurabh Sachdeva) who goes about ‘eliminating’ the ‘gandagi’ from the ‘samaaj’ is hard at work, and turns into one of Neelesh’s roadblocks, along with Vidhi’s violent cousin, hate-filled chacha, and a newly-married sister (Deeksha Joshi) who is there to tell us that compromise and good matches go hand-in-hand : providing garam puris will always be the domain of the bahu. Neelesh’s father (Vipin Sharma) whose job as a cross-dresser dancer is also his vocation, is a matter of shame, which needs to be addressed.
This is a film which is clearly on the right side of many of the hot button issues we need to be pressing: casteism, classism, feminism, sexual identities. While at it, you can see an awareness of the wrongs and injustices which have made, and continue to make headlines. A student suicide on campus after his fellowship is stopped because of his ‘activism’, reminds us of the Rohith Vemula case. Vidhi talks of ‘noodles and jeans and cellphones’ as things ‘good girls shouldn’t have’. Her uncle talks of the danger of ‘padhi likhi ladkiyaan’, and her father (Harish Khanna) is shown as weak, unable to take a clear stand, like so many of us. When Neelesh cries out, can’t you see how things are, he is not just calling out Vidhi’s blindness– ‘mujhe laga yeh sab gaon mein hota hai, yahan nahin’– it is all of ours.
Even though the film is never as searing as it could have been, it is miles ahead of the original ‘Dhadak’, which in turn was an adaptation of Nagraj Manjule’s ‘Sairat’, a blockbuster which redefined the contemporary young love story in Indian cinema. Maybe it is us, the audience which refuses to be repelled, which is to blame, with filmmakers shying away from showing the true depths of discrimination. But it is still important and timely, and as political as a mainstream film is allowed to be in these times, opening with Thomas Jefferson’s famous line ‘when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty’.
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Dhadak 2 movie cast: Triptii Dimri, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Saad Bilgrami, Aditya Thakare, Harish Khanna, Zakir Hussain, Vipin Sharma, Deeksha Joshi, Manjari Pupala, Saurabh Sachdeva, Anubha Fatehpura, Abhay Joshi
Dhadak 2 movie director: Shazia Iqbal
Dhadak 2 movie rating: 2.5 stars
