Govinda Naam Mera review: A riotous mix of silliness and style

In a scene from Disney+ Hotstar’s Govinda Naam Mera, Govinda, played by the terrific Vicky Kaushal, returns home to his wife cosying up to another man on the couch. We know the relationship between the couple is strained, but here that friction is dialled up to the point of ludicrousness. Govinda, an aspiring choreographer in the Mumbai film industry, is urged by his wife and her boyfriend to showcase his dancing talent. It’s a bizarre, side-splitting sequence that gives into the kind of shrill yet effective humour that has gone missing from our cinema of late. To which effect, Govinda Naam Mera is loud, chaotic and possibly just about frivolous enough to beam with energy that though hit and miss, is never really ignorable.

Vicky Kaushal stars as Govinda Waghmare, a down-on-his-luck dancer who happens to be in a toxic relationship with wife Gauri, played by the ecstatically wicked Bhumi Pednekar. Govinda is persistently emasculated by the women in his life, including for that matter, his house help. At work, he also has a love interest in Suku, played with conviction by Kiara Advani. The love triangle here isn’t as much as a triangle, as a petty inconvenience that all participants are agree upon. There is in fact, a hilarious exchange between the wife and the girlfriend that though it punctures the potential of mining the secrecy of the ‘other’, is still another instance of caution being thrown to the wind. It’s pretty much the template with the film.

Govinda stands to inherit an ancestral house, that is subject of a legal tussle between him and his father’s other wife. It’s implausible really that this man, under ungodly duress can summon anything like energy or a smile. The film, however, revels in the trivialising the suffering, as it presents a post-shame world where everything feels as significant as the thumb tacks that occupy notice boards for years without really holding up anything important. Govinda and Suku continue to pursue their dreams of making it as a choreographer couple in Bollywood, as the world around them continues to stand humourlessly still. Even their struggle is mutinously funny.

In principle, Govinda Naam Mera has a lot in common with the milieu of Hotstar’s equally adept and entertaining Lootcase. But here there is quite simply a better grade of star quality, a crazier mix of pivotal characters and the conviction to embrace audaciously bizarre levels of conceit and deprivation. A cameo by an A-list star in the film, for example, is unsurprisingly fun but also insightful for just how meta and self-referential the film eventually becomes. Writer-Director Shashank Khaitan is prepared to look inward, and highlight the many puzzling yet tragicomic inequities that pervade an industry that is as hard to figure as it is to scale.

The kookiness of Khaitan’s film doesn’t just perpetuate the myth of its deliriousness but also highlights a certain vapidity at the heart of modern art. A supporting character by the name of ‘Six Pack Sandy’, is an uproarious creation of both drug and social media – the two used interchangeably here. This man/popstar is supported by an incredulous but cunning father played by the unmissable Sayaji Shinde. And though this father-son duo merely supports the narrative they provide some of the film’s greatest moments – including what is possibly the most hysterically written good bad song of the year.

It’s hard to fault a Govinda Naam Mera, because so intent is the film on frivolity, it’s impossible to want to reign it in for the sake of muddled, but also thwarted logic. Even the sobering moments of the film, scenes in which grief and trauma ought to take over are quickly transformed into maddening highs of catharsis. Credit to the entire cast then for pulling off this giddy, hysterical ride without ever extending itself to cartoonish depths. It’s a riot, so to speak, all along the way, and it makes you wonder if a film like this – much like Lootcase – could have used the collective energy of a theatrical environment.

There is a running joke in Govinda Naam Mera where the hyphenated identity of Govinda is often recognised as Govind. “Woh birth certificate mein galti hogya tha,” Kaushal tells a judge, and then some others, repeatedly in a film that in essence harks back to the days of the actor who last embodied madness, chic and exaggeration with such consummate ease. He was of course known as Govinda. This is probably an inexact tribute, but the fact that the film is set under the canopy of the film industry, makes it all the more resolute and relevant against the tertiary walls of access and privilege. That is of course, a deeper, more determined reading of a film that is content, and evidently adept at being about nothing in particular. Other than of course, fun.

Govinda Naam Mera is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar

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

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