Jayeshbhai Jordaar movie review: Ranveer Singh tries hard but the movie has no ‘jor’

How far will the desperation for a ‘waaris’ (male heir) take you? If you are Jayesh bhai (Ranveer Singh) and Mudra ben (Shalini Pandey), a young couple waiting to live under the thumb of overbearing elders, you will cue down to their dictates, which in addition to everything else may include a gender determination test.

First of all, in order for a film to capture this in order to hammer it down as a harmful, illegal practice that should never have existed in the first place, it needs to figure out exactly what tone it will assume. Jocular, factual, pointed or deliberately leaves a loophole from which the culprits can crawl out? Fearing that it would be too much of a documentary that problem-based features are so often accused of, you have periodically run off with colorful characters, crooked detours, a young child without realizing that you are eroding your own film. movie. nuclear.

That’s exactly what’s happening in this recent YRF outing. In his eagerness to cement the shyness of Jayesh, who cannot open his mouth in front of his babuji (Boman Irani) and ba (Ratna Pathak Shah), we get scene after scene where Patel Sr. becomes a roaring patriarch and his wife must be his female counterpart. And it follows scene after scene where Jayesh is as much as a shield he can for the pregnant woman who is about to give birth to Mudra, and his nine-year-old daughter, against his parents and ‘samaaj’ (the film brings up ‘society’ by any occasion, giving its older protagonists an excuse to be who they are). What can the poor do when society itself is so regressive?

And in case we were getting heavy down all over Gujarat (now it would never do that), we get a bunch of Haryanvi ‘pehelwaans’ (led by the muscular Puneet Issar) who are all sad to have gotten rid of . of their girl children even before they were born. Again, a point to be made, but is weak laughter the only way to do this? When the boy-hungry seniors are not disgustingly misogynistic towards the women buried under their ‘ghoonghats’, they chase Jayesh and Mudra, who are on the run. What will this film just be? A hunt, a comedy or a movie full of meaning? The last time YRF managed to put all its ducks in line, it was with the terrific ‘Dum Lagaa Ke Haisha‘, and that was in 2015.

No one escapes unharmed. Ranveer Singh tries very hard to be ‘earth year’, but is let down by the film, which literally has no ‘earth’. Shalini Pandey, the humble little girl from ‘Arjun Reddy’, becomes a humble little wife here. Boman Irani has nothing to do but shout the house down and Pathak Shah is handed a ‘Mirch Masala’ scene that reminds us of the winner of a movie that stacked all its tires behind its besieged women and won the day.

Ranveer Singh in a still image from Jayeshbhai Jordaar.

Not such luck here. The intentions of ‘Jayeshbhai Jordaar’ may have been noble, but the film comes out as a babble of characters fluttering around in a plot that makes you bite your teeth together. Imagine having a movie that has a protagonist responsible for the deaths of several unborn children without the act leaving a noticeable scar on his soul: he just throws it out in a line, sheds a tear, and that’s the end of that.

Finally, a character says out loud: yeh kya ho raha hai yahan? (What’s going on right here?). It does not come a second too soon.