Cinemaah

Don’t Mention It


It is a strange world Anees Bazmee inhabits—it is located in Canada, but it is a place where men are perpetually horny and skimpily dressed woman are cavorting everywhere, just waiting to be picked up.  These women are obviously just inflatable dolls without intellect or emotion.  At one point in Thank You,  the film’s leading men march an army of “girlfriends” to what the mistakenly believe is a gangster’s den, and ask him to take his pick.

In this world, wives are women who stay home and serve their husbands, or dress up and shop, keep karvachauth fasts even for unfaithful creeps, and put up with infidelity and ill-treatment.  If they do fight back, it is with deviousness, not because they deserve their dignity.

With the twisted logic of the twisted minds who wrote (?) this film, a serial philanderer tells his wife, who he suspects of having an affair, that he has more shame than her, since he carries on his affairs on the sly, and she is shameless because she is flaunting her man.

Most alarming was that children were watching this film in a suburban theatre, and god knows what ideas they will get about marriage and relationships. 

Vikram (Irrfan Khan) and his friends Raj (Bobby Deol) and Yogi (Suneil Shetty) spend all their time chasing women and cooking up elaborate lies to deceive their wives. Vikram’s wife (Rimi Sen) is a cowering cow, Yogi’s (Celina Jaitley) an angry banshee and Raj’s (Sonam Kapoor) wife is in denial.

The women hire a flute-playing detective Kishen (Akshay Kumar) to help lasso their straying husbands; the husbands hire the same guy to find out who is carrying tales to their wives.  And the detective has made it a mission in life to save marriages from falling apart, even it means a wronged woman cannot move on in life, but has to remarry the bad husband, to uphold some weird rule of ‘Indian culture.’

It is not in the least bit funny. No Entry, Masti and Shaadi No 1, were not either, but they were not as offensive as this one. The lines are cringe-worthy, the performances mechanical. At least one of the cast—Sonam Kapoor— is a young woman of today; didn’t she even think once before signing a film that demeans not just her but all women?

Okay, so there will be some who will say it’s just a commercial film, why take it seriously; but then why spend good money on it at all!