At one point in Ram Narayan’s Laila, Sonu (Vishwak Sen) mumbles ‘E is equal to MC square’ while figuring out the make-up technique for a woman. In another sequence, Sonu carries his muse on his shoulders and runs around a park to prove his stamina — a visual executed with laughably bad VFX. In a self-admittedly silly film, these moments could have fit right in.
And Laila has a good start with a rather goofy premise—A young man takes up a woman’s disguise to protect himself and his mother’s last relic. The sad part is, the film is also too desperate for our laughs and fails miserably in its attempts to hold our attention.
I wish the makers had the gall to go all out in their search for madcap humour. There are sprinkles of potential—Abhimanyu Singh is very good as Rustum, and there’s great comedic potential in watching a powerful man, much-feared by everyone around him, go hopelessly desperate and weak-kneed when it comes to matters of love.
If some of those moments evoke a chuckle, it’s only because how committed Abhimanyu is to the part, irrespective of how lifeless everything else is.
Because it is a ‘youthful’ entertainer, writer Vasudeva Murthy makes space for the cursory love track early in the first half (topped up with blatant objectification of film’s female lad Akanksha Sharma), only to dispose the character when stakes are raised.
The messaging couldn’t be any clearer—This is a Vishwak Sen film, targeted at adolescent men, brimming with macho energy, that has no scope for a female protagonist to be possibly integral to the plot. Which is a shame because some of the early scenes hold a lot of promise.
Sonu is established as a popular make-up artist not merely for his skills as a beautician, but also for how he treats women — he talks tenderly, he peps them up, he respects them for who they are, and more importantly, he believes everyone is beautiful in their own way.
So when the same film later incorporates jokes about dark skin, writing an entire subplot where a woman is deemed ugly, unwanted and ‘unmarriagable’ because she is dusky, you feel cheated and repelled. With these tropes, Laila reduces itself to a film with no soul or integrity. This is why despite its potential for heartwarming sentimentality, the end result remains a messy potpourri, a tiring, unfunny barrage of gags disguised as a ‘situational comedy.’
In fact, the entire second half is a singular situation—Sonu, now posing as Laila, tackles sexual advances from not one but two lecherous men, while attempting to stay safe.
The plot doesn’t move an inch, and no amount of ribald humour can hide the vacuous storytelling. Vishwak Sen tries a little too hard but fails to make things interesting with his presence.
Laila also comes at an important moment in our pop culture discourse when the entire nation is busy drawing boundaries for what constitutes as ‘decent’ comedy. Risque comedy has always invited a lot of judgment, sometimes unfairly so. But before dismissing the genre in itself, one must realise the brand of humour in itself is not bad. The problem with Laila is how embarrassingly fixated it remains on its double entendres, refusing to offer anything else.
Also, Laila somehow ends up becoming a worse product—a film so misguided about its values, where it thinks its preaching something noble while merely serving a far more regressive idea under the garb of a message.
In one of the most horrendous moment in the film, as an old man discovers his daughter-in-law is dark-skinned, the director intercuts the moment with the ‘Goli Maar’ video, the popular Chiranjeevi tribute to Michael Jackson where the two appeared as zombies. No amount of sweeping climactic resolutions, where a character sermonises that ‘character is more important than beauty,’ can make up for cinematic sins like this.
Laila
Cast: Vishwak Sen, Akanksha Sharma, Abhimanyu Singh, Kamakshi Bhaskarla, Babloo Prithiveeraj
Director: Ram Narayan