Honeymoon Travels: Six Degrees of Togetherness

(First published at DesiCritics)

Reema Kagti's Honeymoon Travels is a comedy about six couples taking the eponymous tourist bus to Goa. All the stories are told with youthful, irreverent and yet insightful humor.
Kagti's literary devices - a radio jockey as the narrator and his Hindi film songs to convey her character's flashbacks - are narrative masterstrokes. This treatment makes the stories comic without trivializing their message. So let's, to quote the movie's tour guide Sunil, "introduce ourselves to ourselves".
Meet then, the jazzy Gujarati newlyweds Shilpa (Diya Mirza) "forcefully" married to Hitesh Patel (Ranvir Shorey) while secretly having the hearts for mysterious motorcycle man. Early on in the film, the resolution to this conflict - Shilpa eloping with her lover and freeing herself - sets the tone for the remaining stories.
Diya Mirza is aptly weepy and funny, while Ranvir Shorey fits the flamboyant Gujarati businessman to a tee: accent, body language, et al. Note his excellent performance when licking his wounded ego after Shilpa elopes.
Meet also, the dignified, lovable fifty-something Naheed (Shabana Azmi) just married to a Goan Christian, Oscar (Boman Irani). Both have gone through terrible tragedies and have found love in each other. Oscar's quick and often self-deprecating wit (he announces them as "Mr. and Mrs. 55", mocking those who constantly patronize them for being newlyweds at their age) and his bad Urdu diction are qualities that endear him to Naheed and to us.
Note also, the scene where he concocts a fantastically improbable plane crash story when telling a tourist how he met Naheed. Again, the story is comic but its message is serious: he and Naheed are survivors. And Bollywood, take a lesson from Ms Kagti, Ms Azmi and Mr Irani: this is how lovers kiss.
No change in light, no mushy close ups and soft focus, nothing: just a simple, sweet and heart-warming kiss. Naheed helps Oscar reconcile with his troubled teenage daughter, giving us our second happy ending. Boman Irani is excellent as the laugh-at-life Goan and Shabana Azmi is, of course, the dignified Urdu-speaking woman: a casting masterstroke, this.
Next, the garrulous, Bollywood-smitten Punjab di Pinky (Ameesha Patel) and her forced-to-be-quiet hubby Vicky (Karan Khanna). Their conflict is tied to our next couple: the bold and sassy Madhu (Sandhya Mridul) and the shy American-Indian Bunty (Vikram Chatwal).
Madhu, too, has a painful past which beautifully explains her present persona. In Bunty, Ms Kagti scores another first for Hindi cinema: she confidently and path-breakingly creates a perfectly normal and believable gay man. You can't help remarking that it had to be a woman director who did that. Again: Bollywood, this is how it's done.
Unfortunately, the resolution to this conflict (and therefore Pinky and Vicky's too) seems more to the writer's convenience than the two couples'. Fortunately, this is the only flaw in the entire film. Sandhya Mridul is expressive and spirited as always and Ameesha Patel as the Bollywood Barbie is perfect.
Our next couple is, in effect, Kagti's trump card: the comically made for each other Aspi (Abhay Deol) and Zara (Minnisha Lamba). They have identical tastes, quirks, mannerisms and movements. They are every couple's envy and have never, ever fought. They are literally - thanks to a childhood accident involving the Haley's comet - a super couple. And after sixteen super blissful years, they fight.
And give us the wonderful moral of Kagti's story, "Only Supercouples don't fight for sixteen years". Kudos to Kagti; using Superman and Superwoman is another masterstroke!
At the heart of the film, however, is the story of Milly Sen (Raima Sen), a young-at-heart, middle class and mildly rebellious woman betrothed to a quintessentially bhadralok Bengali Partho Sen (Kay Kay Menon).
Milly and Partho, we are told, are in a supremacy race with each other. Each one wants to be on the top: yes, in bed and in life. We laugh at them and ourselves when Kagti cuts from the duel in bed to a shot showing them in a boxing ring packing punches at each other, egged on by their villainous mothers. We feel Milli's pain at being wronged, as she lies down in the ring and concedes the title.
Kagti's brilliance lies in the fact that she uses this absurd humor to bring out, and make us laugh at, our own absurdities. Milly boggie-woogies a bit at the evening party and the uptight babu bhadralok is apologetic, "My wife has become a hippie in Goa". But the turning point comes when Partho must prove to a swimsuit clad Madhu that Milly can damn well parasail in a saree.
Alas, his eyes are opened when the saree comes off in the sky. He is down below, embarrassedly cursing everyone like a knight guarding his lady's honor. But Milly is up in the sky, carefree and flying. Milly is, at long last, free. "No, I don't want to wear the saree", she matter-of-factly but firmly tells Partho upon landing. The tide has turned for the better.
Partho, by the end of the film, accepts Milly's independent spirit. And, with a little help from free-spirited Goa's party potions, he changes by the end of the film; he is ready to move out of his parents' house. He, too, is free. The transition of both these characters is Kagti's pointer to the transition in the Indian middle class.
Partho and Milly's story is also, by and large, our story. Kay Kay Menon is one of the finest actors around today. He internalizes and embodies the conflict between the old and the new that Partho represents. Raima Sen is a class act and a delight to watch. Note her expressions walking around in a blouse and petticoat with a twinkle in her eyes on the beach. In that one scene, she becomes the heroine of the film.
Anurag Kashyap's dialogue is full of colloquial wit and is amazingly in tune with the characters' backgrounds (note Madhu's Bambaiyyaa Hindi when she snaps at the auto-rickshaw driver, "Mere ko nahiiN sun ne kaa hai"). He is one of the best things to have happened to Bollywood. Vishal-Shekhar's background score is peppy and in keeping with the film's mood.
But we doff our hats to Madame Kagti. First, comedies and stories-within-a-story films are two of the hardest genres to write and direct. Full marks to a first time director for scoring a double whammy! Far as my memory goes, this is the very first Hindi film to succeed at this Love Actually/Crash format.
Second, Reema Kagti's film has a celebratory, endearing feminist undercurrent that refreshingly breaks away from the usual damsel-in-distress woman-centric films such as Tanuja Chandra's Dushman, Kalpana Lajmi's Rudaali, Daman and Chingaari, Mahesh Manjrekar's Astitva or Madhur Bhandarkar's Satta. That is another first for Hindi cinema (even the great Hrishida's Mili was dying, remember?).
Kagti's woman is comfortable with herself; her own identity and her commitment to the man in her life (captured by the song, 'Sajnaa jii waarii waarii jaauuN jii maiN') don't compromise each other. On a related note, though, surely lyricist Javed Akhtar and/or Kagti could've avoided 'charanoN meN tere jagah paauuN'? There's always the heart, you know.
All this is not to slot Kagti as a 'female' director, or the film as a feminist film. The feminism is an undercurrent; the film is a one-of-a-kind hilarious and paisaa-wasool human comedy.