Satyaprem Ki Katha movie review: A melodrama on rape that is at pains to mask its male saviour complex

Cast: Kartik Aaryan, Kiara Advani, Gajraj Rao, Supriya Pathak Kapur, Shikha Talsania, Anooradha Patel, Siddharth Randeria, Rajpal Yadav        

Director: Sameer Vidwans  

Language: Hindi with Gujarati    

From the palpable animosity towards women that pervaded Pyaar Ka Punchnama to a film that deploys a megaphone against sexual assault by men is quite a leap for Kartik Aaryan. But Satyaprem Ki Katha is far from being a feminist film. On the contrary, despite its goal – rare in Hindi cinema – of batting against date rape and marital rape, it does not have the intellectual capacity to grasp the values it claims to espouse or the sensitivity and commitment to effectively uphold them.

If director Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama radiated hatred for women, Sameer Vidwans’ Satyaprem Ki Katha is a blazing ball of sermons on women’s agency even as it robs a woman of the agency to determine her own response to an assault. A film with a male saviour complex is nothing new. What’s unusual here is the laboured and transparent effort to mask it.

The beating heart of this film written by Karan Shrikaant Sharma is clear from the song Gujju Pataka lip synced by Aaryan, playing alongside the opening credits. “Jo bhi mujhe karna hai karta hoon bol ke (roughly: I do whatever I want to, unapologetically),” it goes. These words are divorced from the leading man’s overall characterisation and bio but, well, inconsistency is the script’s most consistent quality. Irrespective of the disconnect with what Satyaprem Ki Katha stands for in its entirety, these are hardly the lyrics to include in a film where the overriding theme is women’s consent in sexual relations.

This then is Satyaprem Ki Katha in a nutshell: seesawing between its dual goals of backing women’s rights and lionising the male protagonist, including by assigning him lines like these harking back to every film that has ever bol ke peddled aggressive masculinity.

Clue no. 2 to the film’s questionable commitment to its premise is the wordplay in the title. Aaryan is Satyaprem, Kiara Advani is Katha. Satyaprem Ki Katha thus translates variously to A Story of True Love, Satyaprem’s Katha (note the possessive case) or The Story of (A Man Named) Satyaprem. All very accurate, because although Katha – the woman, not the common noun – is given plenty of space and a graph, ultimately, this is his story, not hers.

So Satyaprem is a disgruntled youth who failed his final LLB exams and now, along with his father Narayan (Gajraj Rao), takes care of their home. Satyaprem’s acid-tongued mother Diwali (Supriya Pathak) and sister Sejal (Shikha Talsania) do not lift a finger to do domestic chores. The house runs on the women’s earnings. Many are the jokes drawn from this living arrangement in the pre-interval portion. This must be Feminism Minus 101: where a film is positioned as being forward thinking even though it comedifies men doing housework.

Satyaprem loves Katha, but she loves someone else. Circumstances bring them together, and thence the film and the man both switch to warrior and saviour mode.

Pretty much everything in Satyaprem Ki Katha is loud: the sets for most of the song and dance routines, the characters, the emotions, the messianic zeal. No stand is taken without underlining it with the boldest available pen. Oddly enough, just when the narrative seems to have lost its way completely, the writing conjures up chemistry between the lead couple and unexpected moments of tenderness. Just as that tenderness begins to settle in though, melodrama kicks in.

Satyaprem Ki Katha comes a year after Advani and Aaryan rocked the box-office with Bhool Bhulaiyya 2. If you have seen Guilty, you know that Advani has it in her to reach into the soul of a character. Rao, Pathak Kapur and she make something of their roles by digging deep in the film’s best written scenes. All three are so vastly superior to Aaryan in the acting department that they chew him up each time they share the screen with him while he dips into his stock of two whole expressions. It does not help that filmmakers who cast him are determined to pay tribute to his famous monologue from Pyaar Ka Punchnama? Seriously, it’s so unfunny.

Such clichés when combined with the leading man’s shortcomings and the contradictions in the film’s politics, make it really hard to forgive it on the grounds that it means well as some might argue. Besides, a closer look suggests that Satyaprem Ki Katha’s mess-ups are not quite as innocent as they appear.

Early in this katha, an elderly man persuades his son to visit a young lady, taking advantage of the fact that she is alone at home, to tell her he loves her. Fair enough. The son, supposedly a nice guy, takes Daddy’s advice to mean: climb the boundary wall of the compound, break into the house. Yes, all this in a film about the meaning of consent. A counter to criticism of this episode has been pre-emptively written into it: it turns out that the woman needs medical attention, and so, the man’s unacceptable conduct ends up saving her life.

In Satyaprem Ki Katha’s most infuriating passage, a man disregards a survivor’s wishes and publicises her rape at a social gathering, his attitude being that she has nothing to be ashamed of. Of course she does not, but it is for her to decide who she wants to tell, when and where, you idiot. Again, a counter to criticism of this episode has been pre-emptively written into the script by portraying the woman as being empowered by his actions.

Innocent? I think not.

The film’s position on allyship is so dangerous that it feels almost frivolous to analyse other aspects, so I’ll wrap up this part of the review in quick bullet points. First, the much-discussed remix of Pasoori Nu in Satyaprem Ki Katha’s soundtrack is not a patch on the original from Coke Studio Pakistan sung by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill. Second, that said, the scene featuring the song and the entire honeymoon sequence are shot beautifully by Ayananka Bose and his team. Third, at least one product placement in the film is so glaring as to be laughable. Fourth, the film is situated in Gujarat, but barring the Hindi-Gujarati dialogues, the setting is not explored for anything more than surface markers of Gujaratiness. Fifth, Satyaprem’s interaction with the milkman (Rajpal Yadav) reeks of a casteist, classist mindset that is treated as humour instead. Fifth, the Hindi film industry’s conviction that smoking is an important marker of a woman’s progressiveness is taken a step further in Satyaprem Ki Katha, which pointedly positions a shared cigarette as an indicator of a man’s feminism, with no context or depth. Retire this shallow notion, please.

The small and big slip-ups in this katha and even Advani’s best moments are put in the shade though by the writer’s apparent belief that it is okay for a man to badger a woman with support if he believes he is a true ally. At one point, Satyaprem tells Katha: “Hero heroine ko nahin bachaayega toh hero kaise banega (If the hero does not save the heroine then how will he become a hero)?” Much later, he acknowledges that he has imposed on her his view of what’s best for her. And then the film goes right back to doing precisely that. Seriously boys, make up your minds.

Rating: 1.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Satyaprem Ki Katha is in theatres

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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