Pati Patni Aur Woh Do belongs to that familiar subgenre of Hindi comedy where men create catastrophes through lies and cowardice, then expect applause for surviving the consequences. Ayushmann Khurrana plays Prajapati Pandey, a forest ranger introduced with the kind of exaggerated masculinity the film both mocks and indulges. When on a mission to trap a roaming leopard in Prayagraj, where Mudassar Aziz locates the chaos, Prajapati is described as a “leopard Casanova.”
Prajapati is a hero in the forest, respected by his forest department colleagues. At home, he has a solid and progressive relationship with his TV reporter wife, Aparna (Wamiqa Gabbi). But Praja’s defining trait is an inflated saviour complex, one that the screenplay never pauses to question. He inserts himself into situations, concocts increasingly idiotic plans, and then spends the rest of the film scrambling through misunderstandings of his own making. Every crisis emerges from ego, panic, sheer stupidity or a guilt trip, yet the film continues to treat him like an essentially noble fool. Why does he even get embroiled in college friend Chanchal Kumari’s (Sara Ali Khan) emotional drama involving a casteist politician Gajraj (Tigmanshu Dhulia) and his fairly benign son?
The fourth character in this crazy dynamic is forest doctor Niloufer Khan (Rakul Preet Singh), who is besties with both Aparna and Prajapati. For brief moments, the film seems interested in the possibility of a genuinely platonic friendship between Praja and Niloufer. But Hindi cinema still struggles to imagine emotional intimacy without romantic suspicion or possessiveness creeping in.
This is Uttar Pradesh populated by stereotypes: corrupt cops, swaggering local toughs, casually abrasive banter and the everyday machismo of small-town North India, which give the film texture even when the writing does not. The humour sours further when it reduces queerness to punchlines built on ridicule and disgust, with those scenes feeling inherited from an older, lazier school of comedy.
Ayushmann Khurrana pushes the comedy with every escalating disaster. The women are notably more restrained than the film around them. Wamiqa Gabbi gives the proceedings some composure, while Sara Ali Khan’s Chanchal is styled with meticulous coordination of bangles and bindis, even when deeply distressed. Rakul Preet Singh unsuccessfully tries to match Khurrana beat for beat. Vijay Raaz and Ayesha Raza Mishra’s amped-up comedy simply comes across as loud and angry.
The absurdity of situation includes a potential collision of the wife, husband and believed mistresses in an under-construction building, a tackily filmed Punjabi song sequence in Banaras staged around a bhang high, and a run-in with authorities at rent by-the-hour ‘Moyo Hotels: Keep Coming’.
Mercifully, Pati Patni Aur Woh Do is only 117 minutes long. But it remains curiously disengaged from the people inside its farce. The misunderstandings are not accidents as much as they are the by-products of a man convinced that intervention is virtue, which might have worked had the writers worked harder on the comedy.
‘Pati Patni Aur Woh Do’ is in theatres.
Udita Jhunjhunwala is a Goa-based writer and curator.