Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey: A bubbling satire on gender stereotypes that loses its fizz

It takes a really gutsy actor to play the kind of sexist buffoon that Basil Joseph plays with such unselfconscious fluency in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, a satire on gender stereotypes now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar which begins on a high note and then slides down the creative chute quickly leaving us looking at a film that could have been so much more than just a poke in the rib at sexism.

Early on, the screenplay takes some sly swipes at gender stereotyping when Jaya is shown as a school student who falls in love with her supposedly progressive teacher (Aju Verghese).In no time at all, he turns out to be a certifiable MCP after she says yes to his marriage proposal. The marriage is quickly called off, and another one is arranged.

The men, as you must have guessed, get the raw end of the stick in the screenplay.

Rajesh (Basil Joseph) arrives with his cousin and the rest of the family to finalize his arranged marriage with Jaya (Darshana Rajendran). It is crystal-clear from the start that the sullen suitor is strictly off-limits. Jaya is married off to Rajesh nonetheless. Sometimes it is preferable to not see the obvious.

The bidaai sequence, with her Mama (Sudheer Paravoor, devilishly delightful) sobbing the loudest, is one of the funniest screen depictions of subverted satire in recent times. The rest of the film just doesn’t match up, or even add up. It is as though director Vipin Das logged into a terrific idea — wife learns karate online to hit back at her abusive husband — and then didn’t know what to do with it, or where to take it.

After Jaya’s revenge, the narration slips into a kind of creative coma, from which it finds itself hard to climb out, as the plot sinks deeper and deeper into the gender conundrum without knowing what to pick out from the vast cauldron of domestic violence.

So, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey goes for the jocular even as the wife Jaya lunges for her husband’s jugular. Domestic violence as an ongoing joke doesn’t really work. The issue was far more sensibly tapped in Charukesh Sekar’s Telugu film Ammu. There, the husband’s bouts of violence was recorded with frightening immediacy.

Here it is all lumped into a lighter spirit. I am not sure that works in a film about domestic abuse. It all seems like a joke without a proper punchline. He slaps her, takes her out to a restaurant to make up, asks her if she is ‘happy’…Slap, makeup, repeat. So it goes until the underlining point is severely diluted.

Nonetheless, there is much to like in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey. The title comes from the national anthem that the husband hums to his wife as a peace gesture on the advice of his cousin (Azees Nedumangad) who tells Rajesh to sing a song to his wife with her name in it.

The divorce judge at the climax (Manju Pillai) aggrandizes the atmosphere of a very serious issue being trivialized.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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