‘Tere Ishk Mein’ review: An angry, self-pitying slog
Anand L Rai's film, starring Dhanush and Kriti Sanon, plays like an apologia for misunderstood men in unrequited love
Mukti’s stalker has just turned up at her engagement party and thrown Molotov cocktails. She responds by hugging and trying to reason with him. He blames her for everything, threatens to kill her, kill himself, suggests the two of them die by suicide. When he’s finally dragged off by the police, she breaks down in the arms of her fiancé, tells him their tortured history. What manner of comfort might Jassi offer his future wife? The first thing he says is, “Shouldn’t you apologize to him?"
The one true thing in Tere Ishk Mein is Kriti Sanon’s horrified face. This is to be expected, since Anand L Rai’s film is a long and winding road to the abject humbling of Mukti. But after a while, I couldn’t help but see in it Sanon’s own horror at just how little the film cares for her character, how insidiously it paints her, and how clearly it revels in her downfall.
After air force pilot Shankar (Dhanush) disobeys orders one too many times, he’s placed on probation. But because there’s a war brewing with Pakistan, he’s told he’ll be reinstated if a psychiatrist gives him a clean chit. The shrink turns out to be Mukti, pregnant and ill but determined to speak to Shankar. The rest of the film is flashback, starting with Mukti’s presentation of her 2200-page (!) thesis on close counselling as a cure for violent tendencies. Enter violent tendencies, Shankar gate-crashing her talk in pursuit of a rival student politician and falling head over heels when she tries to stop him.
Thus begins a courtship that may be intended as roguishly charming but is really insane and alarming. Mukti offers the loutish Shankar a deal: she’ll let him hang around and try and win her heart while she studies him for her PhD and turns him into a peaceful guy. It’s a bizarre and heartless offer—though, of course, Shankar agrees. Even early on, you can sense the film setting Mukti up for a fall. The first significant humiliation is when she promises Shankar ‘fun’ if he refrains from beating up a random man outside college. Sure enough, she takes him to a hotel room and peels off her shirt. He triumphantly walks out—he wants the submission, not the sex.
Shankar, as envisioned by Rai and writers Himanshu Sharma and Neeraj Yadav, is tempestuous and snarly but essentially innocent. Mukti is to blame, the rich girl who smokes and drinks and speaks French. The film is at pains to show her giving Shankar mixed signals (a particularly bizarre one has him studying for the UPSC entrance). “Still so aggressive?" she asks him at one point. “Still imposing your point of view on others?" he responds, eyes watering with hate. Their dynamic becomes that Margaret Atwood line: men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.
Tere Ishk Mein flirts dangerously with MRA self-pity. In one particularly repulsive scene, Shankar pours a transparent liquid over Mukti—not acid, though that’s the fear—and curses her to have a son so “she understands that those who die for love are someone's sons too". Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub has a walk-on part as a priest who’s only there to confirm Shankar’s core beliefs. “Love is death, not mukti (salvation)," he says, before exhorting the young man to burn so bright that “mukti will beg at your feet". By the time Mukti meets Shankar in Leh, he’s moved past unrequited love into curdled hate.
The complication with Rai—as opposed to an empty provocateur like Sandeep Reddy Vanga—is that his films are deeply felt. It’s a big reason Raanjhanaa (2013), his first collaboration with Dhanush, has a considerable fandom while so many other obsessed lover films are forgotten. Rai’s fascination for twisted psychology pushes him to take risks other directors wouldn’t—Shankar bringing up his mother’s violent death just when his fortunes seem to have turned is a striking choice. It gets truly strange at the end, not as much as Rai’s Atrangi Re (2021) but close. Yet, all the mental jujitsu in Tere Ishk Mein is ultimately at the service of a narrow, mean-spirited idea: he loved her so much, why couldn’t she love him back?
Dhanush works hard but the film works harder to make Shankar a victim—of Mukti’s callousness, of her family’s elitism, and of his own trauma. It's so blatant by the end. Shankar, still trying to outrun his demons, is a success, valued by his country, loved by his men. Mukti is a failure, riddled with guilt, endangering her unborn child’s life. There’s a certain audience that’ll delight in the sight of Sanon at Dhanush’s feet. Rai knows that these are the people his film is speaking to, and he goes out of his way to court them.
‘Tere Ishk Mein’ is in theatres.
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