Blingy and musical, Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani is a flawed but woke film

Starring: Alia Bhatt, Ranveer Singh, Jaya Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Dharmendra, Aamir Bashir, Tota Roy Choudhary, Anjali Anand, Kshitee Jog, and Churni Ganguly. 

Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani begins with a potted history of the Randhawas, who are living in a sprawling mansion filled with empty spaces and empty relationships. 

The matriarch of the family, Dhanlakshmi Randhawa (Jaya Bachchan), has unforgiving rules and a cold heart. She also runs a Rs 2,000 crore mithai empire along with her dour-faced son, Tijori Randhawa (Aamir Bashir), while ignoring her gentle, wheelchair-bound husband Kamal (Dharmendra). 

Rocky (Ranveer Singh) is a gym-toned, Ferrari- driving, poor English speaking boy who has to deal with his dominating grandmother and father, alongside his sister Gayatri (Anjali Anand) and mother (Kshitee Jog). 

The Punjabi household is conservative, but also close to reality with details like the man having to be served every meal, a dependence often seen as male privilege. 

Kamal, who suffers from amnesia, suddenly has a flash of memory from his past, which leads him to the memory of a woman named Jamini Chatterjee (Shabana Azmi). Kamal and Jamini, a poetry and culture aficionado, had an affair back in the days, despite being married.

Rocky decides to revive his grandfather’s old-world romance. He meets Jamini’s granddaughter, Rani Chatterjee (Alia Bhatt), a sophisticated, anglicised, and assumed to be a firebrand TV news anchor, to make them connect. 

In contrast with the rigid Randhawas, the Chatterjee household is liberal and progressive, at least on the surface. Their dinner table conversations centre on Rani’s father (Tota Roy Choudhary) discussing how boys now lack rhythm to get a woman’s affection, indulged by her English professor-mother (Churni Ganguly), an ‘in- house Shashi Tharoor’. 

While Kamal and Jamini separated long ago, their love sustained. Meeting Jamini triggers immediate love in Kamal, with both letting go of social taboos and romancing each other right in front of Dhanlakshmi. In the process, Rocky and Rani get drawn to each other despite being complete opposites. 

While Rocky is full-on Punjabi, making errors while speaking in English, Rani is a full-on, elite feminist. Their romance is primarily physical, and inexplicably skin deep for them both to commit for a lifetime. Once that bit is out of the way, a weird three-month family swap comes into play because both are hell bent on winning each other’s families over.

In the second half of the film, Johar and his writers do battle with social taboos and gender bias, overstuffing the plot with unnecessary scenes that exist just to make a point. From fat-shaming to gender stereotyping, male privilege, and cancel culture-it addressed topics without pause. Some of it works well, moving the debate in favour of women. Most battles are Rani’s wins, with a behavioural flaw of hers, also spoiling things towards the end. 

Writers Ishita Moitra, Sumit Roy, and Shashank Khaitaan have worked in contemporary events, like social media outrage, to validate Rani’s progressive behaviour. As the families are crucial in driving the story forward, characters like Dhanlakshmi, Jamini, and the parents have been given some depth. Yet, cliches abound.

The Punjabis come across as unversed in basic facts of life, and their way of living is shown as garrulous and blingy. The Bengalis are steeped in knowledge and modernism. While Rocky scores winning points through the narrative because he has a heart of gold, his behaviour veers on buffoonery at times. 

Rani, on the other hand, is Bollywood’s version of a TV journalist. Her wardrobe would never make it to the air; and her propensity to take on a member of the ruling political party would ensure she struggles to keep or find a job in today’s India. Her producer, Shomen (Namit Roy), is also cliched as a sarcastic and ineffectual Bengali man. 

Rani’s progressive interventions in the Randhawa household seems to spark immediate rebellion. The weakest link in the story though is the super swift evolution of Rocky and Rani’s love story from lust to deep, all immersive love. It happens too fast to be convincing. Even as the Randhawa matriarch and her pliant son are unwelcoming to Rani, the Bengali parents come across as rude hosts to Rocky. Was this intentional? I think not. 

The positive bits of this film are in the arguments it makes. Some scenes-like Rani’s accidental brilliance saving the day for the Mithai empire’s outdated marketing, or a random shopping spree for Rocky with his prospective mother-in law-don’t fit in. Their message though is decidedly pro-women. Juxtaposing the extreme nature of judgemental behaviour that marks almost all social interactions today, it questions ‘cancel culture’. 

The most endearing moments of the film, despite being borderline cheesy, are the romantic escapades of Kamal and Jamini. Something about breaking through norms of marriage and society to re-live one’s love in the twilight years of life is heartwarming. Peppered with retro Hindi songs to extend the film’s appeal to a larger audience, they make statements to replace verbose dialogues about progressive decisions by its characters. The conscious effort of this film has to be viewed in the context of the expectation that a Karan Johar film carries-it tries to argue for progress and acceptance without being preachy. 

Singh, with broken English and sheer energy, holds together the film’s tempo with his performance. Bhatt is good and confident when she battles conventions, but her Bengali accent doesn’t work. In fact, the only accent that sits well is Azmi’s, the finest performance of this film. Dharmendra makes an impact with limited screen time. Ganguly and Choudhary are solid as characters with Bashir being sufficiently sullen. Surprisingly, Bachchan delivers an uneven performance that veers on over-acting at times. 

Manush Nandan’s cinematography has captured every frame aesthetically, with costumes that will set trends (standard Johar). 

Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani is loud and long, at times, staccato in narrative. But it is mostly entertaining and attempts to move the clock on female agency in Hindi cinema. 

However, a defining moment in Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani turns out to be Johar’s brand of cinema on its head. Johar has always aimed for inclusion and acceptance in his own, dramatic, verbose manner with his films. Here, gender roles are subverted in an energetic dance to Dola Re Dola from Sanjay Bhansali’s Devdas, underlining a concerted effort by the mainstream films to tackle current social debates. With a lot of songs, including retro Bollywood classics, Johar’s film is part musical, part melodrama, and overly long. But with colloquial humour and multiple characters packed in, it manages to hold your interest while upgrading the gender conversation in mainstream Hindi cinema. 

Rating: 3.5/5