Vishnu Vishal and Aishwarya Lekshmi return as the couple that can’t stop fighting. This time, they have a daughter. The laughs keep coming, especially in the second half, but the drama isn’t satisfactory. That’s the quick review. The longer, spoiler-filled analysis follows.
Chella Ayyavu’s strength is madcap comic nonsense. Some people may have problems with the old trope of a sexy Malayali woman being dragged out again into the big screen, especially when it’s a schoolteacher in sleeveless blouses. But this character is not meant to make any sense, and she ends up contributing to a dance sequence that brings the house down. Take this other mad sequence set in a courthouse. This makes even less sense, given our knowledge of how courts work. But a joke about the death sentence had me splitting my sides. It’s so casually tossed off, you barely see it coming, and when it does, again, it brings the house down. If you like sexist jokes about a man suspecting his wife of having an affair with the neighbour, that’s here, too. Until I saw this scene, I didn’t know rock-paper-scissors could have a suggestive interpretation. It’s all nonsense, but good nonsense. It works.
The problem with Gatta Kusthi 2 is that it wants to make sense. It wants to talk about gender politics, but the writer-director doesn’t do justice to this angle because everything’s exaggerated and he’s always looking to cut to the next joke or the next big emotional moment. For instance, a mother who’s a wrestler is horrified when she sees her daughter dancing on stage to a Ghilli song. She says that the daughter of a State Champion has no business dancing, and should take up wrestling. One, she forgets that she was herself a young girl who took up something that was not expected of her. And two, we are told later that wrestling is a useful skill for a woman. It is always going to help with self-defence, whether the girl ends up being a professional wrestler or not. All of this is true. But it’s not convincing. This drama keeps popping up in bits, as and when it pleases.
Aishwarya Lekshmi and Vishnu Vishal return as the couple from Part 1. If you remember, she is a wrestler. He is an uneducated man with terribly regressive views about what a woman should be like, and seeing her wrestle makes him become a better man. Now, they have a little girl. Full marks to Vishnu Vishal for taking up the role of a house-husband in the prevailing Tamil-cinema culture. He cooks, he cleans, he’s the daughter’s primary care-giver while the wife goes to office for a sports-quota job. Yes, the screenplay gives him two random fights so he can show he is still macho. But to see a man constantly supporting his wife, always content to remain in the background as she goes after sporting glory – it’s wonderful. But the whole film feels like a conflict that could have been solved if husband and wife just sat down and had an adult conversation about how best to raise the daughter.
Instead, they behave like children. Aishwarya, especially, is given the thankless role of a woman who assumes the worst at every given opportunity, and this kinda-sorta negates the plus points about gender equality and having a house-husband who is happy to be a house-husband. Apparently, the woman is always the shrew, even if the man is a saint. And all this drama is done at the kind of pitch where the woman is taken to a psychiatrist to help her anger issues and the doctor tries to forcefully administer an injection and she bashes him up. There is a random doping angle, a random divorce angle, a random kissing angle, a random pregnancy angle, and a random caricature of a villain. Yes, I know we are not supposed to take these movies seriously, but then, why not just give us the politically incorrect jokes and leave out the politically problematic lectures! Gatta Kusthi 2 feels like an exercise in how to prolong a movie, but at least the laughs work.
