‘Wild Wild Punjab’ review: Funny in parts, but largely gender-biased
“Wild Wild Punjab”, which premiered on Netflix on Wednesday, follows four friends on a road trip with one mission: to take revenge on their ex-girlfriend.
Netflix film ‘Wild Wild Punjab’ doesn’t bore you, but gives you the noisiest hour and a half of your life. Set in Punjab, this film does what many other Bollywood films have been doing forever: stereotype Punjabis as noisy, fun-loving people who are perfect for the humour in the stories.
Here, it seems the makers have taken the same trope a step further. We get four friends: Arora (Sunny Singh), Jainu (Jassi Gill), Honey Paaji (Manjot Singh) and Antim heart broken loverRajesh Khanna aka Khanna (Varun Sharma) is on a road trip with a very peculiar mission. The purpose is to take revenge on Khanna’s ex-girlfriend Vaishali, who cheated on him with another man. The three friends try to cheer him up, as he decides to ruin Vaishali’s marriage. The road trip from Patiala to Pathankot is decided, and thus begins the unnecessary sexist play-off.
Women in ‘Wild Wild Punjab’ are portrayed as villains. They either need protection from the heroes or are too stupid to understand their double-meaning jokes. Sadly, you see Patralekhaa, who is otherwise a commendable actress, reduced to a mere object in the film. ‘Wild Wild Punjab’ doesn’t waste time in setting the stage for misogyny. You see men beating women, treating them as sex objects and putting the responsibility of their happiness on their shoulders.
Sample this: An angry Vaishali calls Khanna to tell him about her marriage. He yells at her and asks her to stop pursuing him. Vaishali tells him very clearly that she is not interested in taking their relationship forward, and that she is happy to marry another man. She is tough and harsh in her words, but her intentions are as clear as day. This upsets Khanna, because how can a woman tell him that she is no longer interested in him? You see a male ego being heavily stroked by three other men – all of whom believe that a woman has no control over her life decisions.
Don’t take this story as a riposte to a woman being cheated on in a relationship. If it were, it wouldn’t seem so clichéd and boring. ‘Wild Wild Punjab’ advises men not to be sensitive about their heartbreak, but to deal with it in a more ‘manly’ way: drinking, driving and swearing all the way to Pathankot.
,Reject me by calling me, rejection from such girls is not tolerated“(Call her and reject her), a friend advises Khanna in an attempt to help her overcome heartbreak. What happened to more mature representations of friendship on screen! Unfortunately, ‘Wild Wild Punjab’ seems so unnecessarily wild that it outshines other sexist films, including the ‘Pyaar Ka Punchnama’ series and ‘Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety’.
A road trip with a gang of boys sounds great on paper. But, do you really need to make the women in their lives look bad to add more swag to your movie? The bigger problem isn’t how the film treats its women, but that it doesn’t treat any of the men as adults. It’s funny in parts if you have an appetite for such jokes, but at best, it feels like a dull celebration of empty-minded men.
