Love and Zumba
When I told Tim I would like to start doing some Bollywood reviews for Alternate Ending, he practically pushed me out the door with a broom and told me to get going, chop chop. So here is the first of what will hopefully be a long line of reviews that expand AE even further into the wide world of cinema. As a white American who doesn’t speak Hindi, there is a lot about the massive phenomenon of Bollywood cinema that I do not have appropriate cultural context for. However, I have a longtime love of the style and my goal is to guide people with a similar lack of cultural context through the sometimes intimidating monolith that is contemporary Bollywood and show you it is not an impenetrable labyrinth, but rather a rich, vibrant, welcoming arena of cinema that everyone should find themselves playing in between watching infinite superhero movies.
Our topic today is Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, an entry in that perennial Bollywood genre: the romantic comedy. The title roughly translates to Romance of Chandigarh; I don’t know why Bollywood never translates their titles for U.S. release but I respect them not really giving a shit about catering to Americans. The film stars Ayushmann Khurrana, currently one of India’s biggest male stars. The actor has made a name for himself in the last 8 years or so as a purveyor of rom-coms with social messages, including starring in last year’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, which made waves as the first mainstream Bollywood rom-com to feature two gay characters in the leading roles.
Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui follows Manu Manjal (Ayushmann Khurrana), a 32-year-old man whose passion is bodybuilding. He runs a failing gym with his twin best friends Riz and Jomo (Gourav and Goutam Sharma) and is still single despite his nosy family - especially his two sisters, who are practically maternal figures since his mother died when he was 13 - constantly pushing him to find someone and get married. They might just get their wish, because an unspeakably attractive and put-together Zumba instructor named Maanvi Bram (Vaani Kapoor) joins their staff and there’s instantly a spark between her and Manu.
Things begin to look up. His family is getting off his back and with the gym now thriving, Manu is able to focus on training for the upcoming bodybuilding competition, in which he will once again be facing off against rival gym-owner Sandy (Abhishek Bajaj). He also begins to date Maanvi, but once he begins to fall head over heels for her, she comes out to him as a trans woman. Cue a journey of the soul that will go some uncomfortable places but of course end up with them achieving their happily ever after. That is not a spoiler. This is a Bollywood rom-com.
Here’s the trouble with the film’s extreme Message Movie vibe. You can only approach it as a message movie, because it’s so obsessed with teaching audiences that Trans Is OK that it doesn’t bother to do much of anything else. That’s not to say it’s not a radical move. As much as it fails to be an accurate representation of the trans experience, revels too much in making her the butt of jokes (though certainly much less than might have been expected), and of course has a cis actress playing a trans woman, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is doing something that even Hollywood hasn’t done: giving a trans character a big, splashy, expensive, generic, stupid romantic comedy. I’m woefully unqualified to continue to describe the ways that this film does or doesn’t (mostly doesn’t) service the proper representation of trans folks in India, but I am also not particularly interested in writing a review that is just a laundry list of cultural failings so I will point you to this review by an actual Indian trans person for context in that regard.
Ultimately, I think Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is using its extremely formulaic plot to highlight its point that trans people deserve to hold a place in mainstream society, so it’s using form to honor function. Unfortunately, the form is a particularly anemic example. The second half of the film is desperately repetitive, running Manu and Maanvi through the same conversation in the exact same location about four times before it’s actually resolved. Plus, to my taste, the film’s musical sequences just aren’t delivering.
The modern Bollywood film has an interesting approach to its musical elements, sometimes leaping into full-blown song and dance numbers (like this film’s sequence set at a Holi festival) and sometimes just letting the actors sing a non-diegetic song that plays over a montage which is shot like a music video (complete with label-to-camera makeup brands and whatnot) but doesn’t actually feature them performing onscreen. Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui mostly features the latter, but spaced out incredibly unevenly with the two biggest moments coming back to back, leaving a lump of dead weight in the middle of the film. Unfortunately, the music isn’t particularly catchy or memorable, so these scenes fail to inject the energy into the film that they need to in order to get it to the two hour mark.
At the end of the day, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is a movie that is more interesting to think about than it is to sit through. For instance, there is a rather subtle element that is never specifically pointed to in the dialogue: Manu’s livelihood is bodybuilding, meaning he knows a thing or two about shaping your body to meet a certain societal expectation of gender presentation. He could have had any generic rom-com career, but the way that the masculine world he has built around himself interacts with femininity is a major element of the visual schema of the film. Now that’s a rather interesting approach that proves the film has more on its mind than just hammering home a message in didactic speeches. But when all it’s supporting is those speeches and not much else, it’s challenging to have fun sitting through it.
That said, if an LGBTQ-themed Bollywood musical rom-com starring Ayushmann Khurrana sounds up your alley, then you should definitely watch… 2020’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan.
Our topic today is Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, an entry in that perennial Bollywood genre: the romantic comedy. The title roughly translates to Romance of Chandigarh; I don’t know why Bollywood never translates their titles for U.S. release but I respect them not really giving a shit about catering to Americans. The film stars Ayushmann Khurrana, currently one of India’s biggest male stars. The actor has made a name for himself in the last 8 years or so as a purveyor of rom-coms with social messages, including starring in last year’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, which made waves as the first mainstream Bollywood rom-com to feature two gay characters in the leading roles.
Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui follows Manu Manjal (Ayushmann Khurrana), a 32-year-old man whose passion is bodybuilding. He runs a failing gym with his twin best friends Riz and Jomo (Gourav and Goutam Sharma) and is still single despite his nosy family - especially his two sisters, who are practically maternal figures since his mother died when he was 13 - constantly pushing him to find someone and get married. They might just get their wish, because an unspeakably attractive and put-together Zumba instructor named Maanvi Bram (Vaani Kapoor) joins their staff and there’s instantly a spark between her and Manu.
Things begin to look up. His family is getting off his back and with the gym now thriving, Manu is able to focus on training for the upcoming bodybuilding competition, in which he will once again be facing off against rival gym-owner Sandy (Abhishek Bajaj). He also begins to date Maanvi, but once he begins to fall head over heels for her, she comes out to him as a trans woman. Cue a journey of the soul that will go some uncomfortable places but of course end up with them achieving their happily ever after. That is not a spoiler. This is a Bollywood rom-com.
Here’s the trouble with the film’s extreme Message Movie vibe. You can only approach it as a message movie, because it’s so obsessed with teaching audiences that Trans Is OK that it doesn’t bother to do much of anything else. That’s not to say it’s not a radical move. As much as it fails to be an accurate representation of the trans experience, revels too much in making her the butt of jokes (though certainly much less than might have been expected), and of course has a cis actress playing a trans woman, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is doing something that even Hollywood hasn’t done: giving a trans character a big, splashy, expensive, generic, stupid romantic comedy. I’m woefully unqualified to continue to describe the ways that this film does or doesn’t (mostly doesn’t) service the proper representation of trans folks in India, but I am also not particularly interested in writing a review that is just a laundry list of cultural failings so I will point you to this review by an actual Indian trans person for context in that regard.
Ultimately, I think Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is using its extremely formulaic plot to highlight its point that trans people deserve to hold a place in mainstream society, so it’s using form to honor function. Unfortunately, the form is a particularly anemic example. The second half of the film is desperately repetitive, running Manu and Maanvi through the same conversation in the exact same location about four times before it’s actually resolved. Plus, to my taste, the film’s musical sequences just aren’t delivering.
The modern Bollywood film has an interesting approach to its musical elements, sometimes leaping into full-blown song and dance numbers (like this film’s sequence set at a Holi festival) and sometimes just letting the actors sing a non-diegetic song that plays over a montage which is shot like a music video (complete with label-to-camera makeup brands and whatnot) but doesn’t actually feature them performing onscreen. Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui mostly features the latter, but spaced out incredibly unevenly with the two biggest moments coming back to back, leaving a lump of dead weight in the middle of the film. Unfortunately, the music isn’t particularly catchy or memorable, so these scenes fail to inject the energy into the film that they need to in order to get it to the two hour mark.
At the end of the day, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is a movie that is more interesting to think about than it is to sit through. For instance, there is a rather subtle element that is never specifically pointed to in the dialogue: Manu’s livelihood is bodybuilding, meaning he knows a thing or two about shaping your body to meet a certain societal expectation of gender presentation. He could have had any generic rom-com career, but the way that the masculine world he has built around himself interacts with femininity is a major element of the visual schema of the film. Now that’s a rather interesting approach that proves the film has more on its mind than just hammering home a message in didactic speeches. But when all it’s supporting is those speeches and not much else, it’s challenging to have fun sitting through it.
That said, if an LGBTQ-themed Bollywood musical rom-com starring Ayushmann Khurrana sounds up your alley, then you should definitely watch… 2020’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
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