Director Laxman Utekar does a huge disservice to his film’s subjects, by skirting around issues instead of mining topical humour out of them. Because Kumars and Kapoors are obviously flag-bearers of Hindu sabhyata. The film deliberately names a muslim Bollywood actor, Nadim Khan, who bats for anti-Bharat concepts like live-in couples. While Stree employed a light touch while dealing with the complex issue of gender politics, Luka Chuppi‘s chooses to pontificate, and offers simplistic solutions to issues like caste, honour killings, Islamophobia and jingoism.Įventually, it becomes the very monster it is trying to satirise. The film’s intention might have been to satirise the anti-romeo squads of Uttar Pradesh, but the film is too focused on being ‘entertaining’ to actually make any pertinent point.
The tone is intentionally exaggerated, where a henchman casually talks about plundering a shop and then setting it on fire. Even if a little dated, the topic of ‘living in’ in present-day Uttar Pradesh makes for an interesting premise, but this one-line concept can not fuel an entire film. Before we know it, the ‘hero’ and the ‘heroine’ are talking about the importance of living together before getting married. And like it usually happens in these movies, sparks fly. Rashmi Trivedi (Kriti Sanon), daughter of the local politician (Vinay Pathak), joins Guddu’s channel as an intern. The primary agenda of the party is to moral-police young couples swayed by ‘western’ beliefs like live-in relationships. Mathura-based journalist Guddu Shukla (Kartik Aaryan), champions the cause of a regional political party. And that’s one of the film’s biggest shortcomings – it tries to be other films without necessarily finding its own skin. With Luka Chuppi, producer Dinesh Vijan tries to rehash the same ingredients from his last year’s success, hoping for another miracle. Using the popular tropes of a small-town setting with a gifted ensemble of actors, the film offered a commentary on intricate gender politics and laughed its way past the 100-crore mark. A recent exception to this rule of Hindi film blockbusters, was 2018’s Stree. Just the other day, Javed Akhtar participated in a podcast where he stated how Hindi film producers were only interested in remaking the same ‘successful’ film.