ONE way to look at Tarun Mansukhani’s 'Dostana' is as a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon. This is a bold, brave film that doesn’t just treat its heroes as the equivalent of comic sidekicks, but as the equivalent of heroines. The item girl in the song that plays over the opening credits is Shilpa Shetty, who’s got the best body in the business today, but the camera elects to feast on John Abraham’s near-naked curves instead. And in a subsequent sequence — a romantic ‘flashback’ in Venice — Abhishek Bachchan adopts the swishiest set of mannerisms to portray the feminine half of a gay couple.
Dostana has got to be the first Bollywood movie in which a macho hero (Abhishek) is inspired to pose as gay a second before wrapping his lips around a suggestively shaped hot dog, and where another equally macho hero (John) goes to sleep with an eye mask emblazoned with the come-hither advertisement, “Well Hung.”
Even if, compared to something like Brokeback Mountain, the extent of edge-pushing here is merely a matter of, uh, inches (the gayness aspect is mainly comic filler). This is truly some sort of milestone, if only because the heroes aren’t saddled with compensatory scenes, with guest-starring heroines, calculated to demonstrate their heterosexuality. They gamely play gay, and that’s all there is to it.
The problem, unfortunately, is that all of this is fascinating fodder for a socio-cultural thesis, while as a movie-watching experience, Dostana is disappointingly flat. It is not merely wobbly in its intentions about just how far to take its gay angle without alienating a wide audience, but is boring and bland as a romantic melodrama as well.
It begins as a nicely giddy farce, with Sameer (Abhishek) and Kunal (John) hatching a scheme to pose as a gay couple to secure a swank Miami apartment. These portions spill over with slapstick, some of which works, a lot of which doesn’t.
But at least the novelty of the situation, along with the off-the-wall energy of the actors, keeps us watching. But soon, Sameer and Kunal fall for Neha (a blisteringly good-looking Priyanka Chopra), and Abhimanyu (Bobby Deol) jumps into the fray to compete for her hand, and the film quickly becomes unrecognisable from the bouncy comedy we started out with. Where there once was fun and gay frolic, there are now tears and recriminations and a surprising amount of mean spiritedness.
Mansukhani apprenticed with Karan Johar, and the only creditable trait he appears to have imbibed from his mentor is how to put on a heck of a song-and-
dance show.
Otherwise, the dramatic moments, which Johar usually pulls off with finesse, are so synthetic and underdeveloped that you barely care about the outcome of the romantic rectangle. When Sameer and Kunal, themselves, seem more interested in playing gay than in winning over Neha, why should we care at all?
Is this a failing of the screenplay that Abhishek and John appear more of a couple with each other than either of them does with Priyanka? Or is it a deliberately subversive subtext in a story that handles homosexuality to an extent unprecedented in a Hindi film?
It’s hard to say, because the scenes that do address homosexuality in an explicit fashion come across as hasty afterthoughts, added on because the gay angle, so far, was simply gravy. Kirron Kher (who plays Sameer’s mother) is used mainly as a hammy comic element. She’s distraught that her son isn’t likely to bring home a daughter-in-law. And, out of nowhere, we’re asked to stifle our sniffles at her acceptance of Kunal as a son-in-law.
As for Kunal, he gets a moment that’s far more bogus, when he confesses, at the end, that the family he’s built over the course of the film is because he chose to be gay. If this is a message of acceptance and tolerance being beamed across to a country that can barely bring itself to discuss heterosexual issues without sniggering, it doesn’t quite come across that way.
The suddenness of the sentiment, instead, makes it seem merely like business as usual in Bollywood, where even a setup this unconventional is incomplete without a payoff that makes an unapologetic bid for easy tears.
