Although the second half of Jayeshbhai Jordaar ends up in a royal mess –and there is good reason for that, which we shall come to later—there is much to be admired in this ticklish take on gender discrimination in a Gujarati hamlet.
Ranveer Singh plays a wimpish weakling with super-hero qualities. Although he is too intimidated by his bully of a father (Boman Irani, spot-on as the arrogant patriarch) to stand up against his gender tyranny, Jayeshbhai is man enough to protect his wife from the debilitating blows of a patriarchal arrogance.
In the film’s funniest, most humorous episode Jayeshbai’s father imperiously orders his son to teach his wife a lesson. Jayeshbhai bolts his bedroom daughter and makes noises of violence pretending to beat his biwi black and blue while their ‘firecracker’ of a daughter Siddhi (Jia Vaidya) makes noises of protest against her mother being so cruelly ill-treated.
While Jayeshbhai’s parents listen in at the door, Jayesh provides ample the violent reassurance that they need to be convinced their son abides by the patriarchal rules of a society. They believe a wife is of use only if she sires male heirs. Jayeshbhai’s wife Mudra (Shalini Pandey) has sired a daughter, and, horror of horrors, another is on the way.
The casual sexual discrimination in a state where the Prime Minister has assured empowerment for women is killingly funny. Jayeshbhai loves his wife and feels no resentment towards her. iIn spite of the absence of a male offspring.
As he tells her during a fit of self-flagellation, “The child’s gender is determined by the father. In that case, you should have left me long ago.”
Ranveer Singh brings to Jayeshbhai’s character a kind of vulnerability and sensitivity that would be considered weaknesses in a patriarchal society. At the risk of being branded a wimpy or even a pansy Jayeshbhai looks out for his pregnant wife and when the lives of mother and child are endangered he flees from his despotic dad’s clammy clutches leaving no forwarding address behind.
Ranveer plays Jayeshbhai as a cross between a papa’s puppet and a caring husband; he gives an absolutely transformative performance, measured yet spontaneous. Is Ranveer then the best actor of his generation? We will discuss this some other time. In Jayeshbhai Jordaar, a film where good intentions overshadow a lot of the nuisance value, Ranveer has deep-dived characters who escape their karma of stereotyping earlier in Bajirao Mastani and Goliyon Ki Rasleela... Ram Leela without falling into the pit of pedestrian self-congratulations.
In Jayeshbhai Jordaar, Ranveer is a class act. The impact of his performance is lamentably lessened by the curse of the second half. Post-interval the narrative goes completely haywire with Boman and his henchmen hunting down Ranveer, wife and daughter who are on the run to save the unborn child.
Once on the way, the debutant director Divyang Thakkar (a big name in Gujarati cinema) doesn’t know where to take the plot. There are embarrassing halts in the plot where I could almost see the writer-director stopping to decide which road to take.
The confident jibes at patriarchy in the first half evaporate in the second half. Good writing succumbs to compromised writing. By the time we come to the climax the women in their stripped-off ghunghats look like distant cousins of the women in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala.
If only we had an inkling of where the story was leading to. All we see in Jayeshbhai Jordaar is a man who spends time protecting his wife against his father’s tyranny. The girl child is saved after a whimsical road trip. Wish we could say the same about the film.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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