Babli Bouncer review: Neither perceptive nor fun

There’s a line that Babli, the protagonist of Disney+Hotstar’s Babli Bouncer repeats. “I am very funny,” she says, in a cutesy, ironic way. Played by Tamannaah Bhatia, Babli belongs to a village on the outskirts of Delhi that has a reputation for nurturing heavy duty men who go on to work as bouncers in Delhi’s pubs. If you’ve followed enough news from the NCR area over the years, the nightlife scene has blossomed to what it is today thanks to a growing coterie of bouncers. Babli Bouncer is obviously an underdog story, given it is anchored in a profession for buxom, overgrown men but here it is framed as a goofy comedy trying to live up to the quirkiness of a profession few understand and fewer still notice. The premise, the setup is promising, but in terms of execution the film’s struggles are far greater than Babli’s.

Babli is the resident of a village that has a history of training men to become pehalwans that go onto to become bouncers in Delhi’s many pubs. She has a father in the always reliable Saurabh Shukla. After a woman creates a clever ruckus at a bar to get out of paying, it is suggested that the time has come to hire a female bouncer. That bouncer, obviously, would be Babli, a rather masculine, and rough-edged Bhatia who goes around bullying men and is consistently told by her mother “Isme ladkiyon wali koi baat hi nahi hai”. Babli has common issues to deal with -the spectre of an arranged marriage, the prospect of living an adult life unfulfilled by ambition, and in this case, the uncommon bracket of having to play feminine despite herself.

Of course Babli’s encounter with the outsider world, the ways of the elite, both as a language and as a people is a delicious collision of worlds. Not to mention her love interest, Viru, is a conventional corporate worker who must also confront the idea of her working in a pub as a bouncer. There is enough here on paper to suggest something intriguing, maybe even perceptive can be extracted from a promising premise. Instead Babli Bouncer settles for crass, immature humour and performances that only serve as reminders of far greater attempts to honour the woman-vying-for-a-men’s-space like Aamir Khan’s Dangal. In a scene, for example, where Babli meets Viru in what seems like a quirky fine-dine restaurant she asks, rather predictably, for “paranthe and lassi”. In another scene her application for the position of a bouncer is adjudged on her ability to do 100 push-ups. This act is followed, by training montage of its own.

There is a lot here to be reconciled as a socio-political dilemma, wrapped in the confusing bun of gender fluidity but instead Babli Bouncer is occupied, trying to reduce, its protagonist to a caricature. The first hour of the film it spends on examining Babli’s illiteracy, her unawareness of the general world beyond the limits of her village. “Ye fuck you kya hota hai,” she asks a male colleague after an entitled woman spews it in her face. There is nothing wrong with extracting humour out of a confident woman’s brush with an often venomous world, deprecating world but here it feels distasteful, not to mention without depth or clarity of what is actually being said about this conflict of class, access and privilege.

The performances in Babli Bouncer are okay, serviceable you could say. Bhatia is given a meaty role, but not enough moments of depth to work with. Even her desire to work as a bouncer is so readily accepted by her own family it rarely offers the kind of frictional fallout that might have helped to build her character. To which effect, despite being an archaic underdog story, Babli is never painted as one. She confronts situations with a stunning nonchalance, a bullish attitude that is never, in the entirety of the film, checked to reveal a side of her that we do not expect. Babli is a woman with ambition and a voice, but strangely, without the complexities that make women like her stand out in our social setup.

Directed by the returning Madhur Bhandarkar, Babli Bouncer’s visual language, its performative laziness, is clearly reminiscent of a bygone era. There is a scene where a village elder confronts her father – just for the heck of it – about her job. Standing on the rooftop Babli, alongside her friend, mimes the tense conversation takes place below. It’s an awkward scene, functionally irrelevant and lacking in both conviction and the nous to pull something of the sort off. It’s also a scene that serves as a metaphor for the rest of the film – an undercooked, underwritten, over-performed mess of genre clichés.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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