The state-sponsored genocide by the Nazis took the lives of anywhere from 70 to 75 million people. The estimated fatalities of the Second World War include over six million Jews and several Slovenes, Romanis, Poles, Serbs, Soviet civilians, and others—such as homosexuals, gypsies, and people with disabilities. The material losses and the money cost to governments involved are billions of dollars that were further compounded by human misery, widespread persecution, and suffering. People were left to die in gas chambers, many went insane after witnessing mass horrors, and those who survived couldn’t really forget the traumas they had experienced. It was horrifying, to say the least. So when Nisha (Janhvi Kapoor) from Nitesh Tiwari‘s Bawaal (currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video) says, “Every relationship goes through its Auschwitz,”—it’s beyond comical, almost absurd and disbelievingly presumptuous. 

Bawaal presents to you Ajay “Ajju” Dixit (Varun Dhawan), an image-conscious sluggish primary school teacher from Lucknow. Ajju is well aware of his incompetencies and tries to mask them through his extravagant—and false—claims. Some in Lucknow have been told he was to become a collector, some think of him as an ‘almost-army officer’, and for the remaining, Ajju bhaiya is the nearby know-it-all, the self-ascribed Sharmaji ka beta (an idiomatic word used to describe a person, usually male who parents hold up as an ideal to their own children). In his words, “One should create a spectacle so good that people forget the result.” He is all talk and no action. So when he comes across Nisha, an intelligent, beautiful, and responsible girl from a business-class family, it feels only normal for him to marry her. “She would be perfect for my image,” he says. However, the fairytale ends even before it begins after Nisha suffers an epilepsy attack on the night of their marriage. “Defected piece,” Ajju calls Nisha—a direct dive into Hitler’s parlance for the Jews. The phrase also pretty much sets the stage for the allegory that is soon to unfold. 

The first half of the film is painstakingly spent familiarizing us with the chauvinist Ajju. Little more than the required time is used to set the context for the transformation that is to follow. After getting suspended for slapping a politician’s son, Ajju decides to take a trip to Europe “to visit the WWII places of interest and live stream his lessons”. The school principal agrees. At this point, the film loses its last inch of believability. If the root of their marital conflict wasn’t shallow enough, the Europe “study trip” only makes it more comical. It is questionable if the makers were going for serious or silly because the current narrative is neither. It is unreasonably absurd, leaving the viewer questioning their decision to watch the film altogether. The first 65 minutes are still watchable, though packed with ridiculously humorless punches. 

Over the course of their trip to Paris-Normandy-Amsterdam-Berlin-Auschwitz, something changes. Ajju realizes the things he knew about Nisha but never really got a chance. She knows how to talk and how to travel. In fact, she even knows history more than him. The couple spends their time touring across the cities while Nisha keeps narrating anecdotes from WWII to Ajju, somehow inducing both emotional and educational sense in the most trivializing way. Nisha is a damsel in distress in the first half and a subtler version of a manic pixie girl in the second half who is a catalyst for Ajju’s redemption. I wouldn’t mind a film about a character’s growth, but I need to feel something for the character in the first place to be remotely bothered about his growth, which is why Bawaal has little impact. 

Ajju returns from the trip as a hero, having “survived an inner war,” but the WWII flashbacks are futile, and the parallels are intended to make a mockery of the Holocaust. The intersection of present and past always has a scope for great possibilities, but this film is directionless and tone-deaf in this regard. As much as I’d like to give the film the benefit of the doubt for having the right heart, the plot of Bawaal is so weak that it’s unthinkable that the film got green-flagged at so many levels. 

No performance can save Bawaal. Varun Dhawan is his quirky self, and Janhvi Kapoor, despite limited screen time, is a pleasure, but what can the actors do if the characters written for them are one-dimensional? Bawaal requires something more than just a suspension of disbelief for one to endure the running time. The film struggles to achieve the high it claims to precisely because the premise and the conflict are so weak that there’s little that can be done to bring it to finality.  

Review Courtesy of Anjani Chadha

Feature Image via Amazon Prime Video