There is a line in the movie Tere Ishk Mein, said by the movie’s female lead, which goes something like, We women always look for the sweetness of this prince-charming kind of boy. But we later realize the greatness is in the salty taste of sweat or tears of a normal guy. The male-dominated audience in the theater from where I saw this movie, who were shouting wah wah for the punchlines of the hero in the initial portions, were mumbling abuses at the female lead when she said the above-mentioned line. Aanand L Rai’s new collaboration with Dhanush, co-written by his frequent collaborator Himanshu Sharma, is tailor-made to give orgasm to all those men’s rights activists.
Shankar, a Delhi guy of Tamil origins, is our main man, and he is in the Indian Air Force. He has a lot of temper issues, and at one point, his disobedience leads to a scenario where his senior officer decides to ground him until a psychological counsellor certifies him as mentally fit for the job. What we see here is the backstory of Shankar that actually made him the Arjun Reddy of the Indian Air Force.
We have seen a dramatic shift in how toxic relationship traits in movies have been received by the audience. Aanand L Rai’s own movie Raanjhanaa was criticized for glorifying obsessive stalking as true love. Even though Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s films were commercially successful, the reactions to his movies were polarized. Even Mani Ratnam’s Kaatru Veliyidei came under the scanner. Tere Ishk Mein, which is considered a spiritual sequel to Raanjhana, almost feels like an attempt by Aanand L Rai to make sure the so-called toxic and problematic love sustains in movie literature. If the storytelling was nuanced, making you think that I have seen such characters and stories in my real life, I would have at least appreciated it for that. But Tere Ishk Mein is an outlandish romantic story where the characterizations and shifts in the drama would make you do a facepalm.
Manipulating the audience into agreeing to a problematic sentiment is also a skill. It is like how some good lawyers would interpret a case in court to win. The silliness of Tere Ishk Mein is that it is so obsessed with its crowd-pleasing strategy that everyone who is against the hero is portrayed as a laughable caricature. Our leading lady is introduced to us as someone who is trying to get a PhD in psychology, and her thesis is that we can cure all the anger issues in people who have childhood trauma. That thesis idea itself sounds bizarre, and to make things worse, we have the female lead, Mukti, doing all kinds of social experiments with Shankar, like asking him to apologize in public. In order to justify the rage of Shankar, Himashu Sharma, and Neeraj Yadav are trying their best to make Mukti the dumbest PhD holder.
One of the reasons why Aanand L Rai’s collaboration with Shah Rukh Khan, Zero, didn’t work was that the story evolved into something incoherent entirely in the second half, with space expeditions, Bollywood, and several other things happening. There is a similar outrageous development happening in Tere Ishk Mein as well. At one point, Shankar, who has been shown as someone with zero academic interest, doesn’t even know what UPSC is, becomes an aspirant. And he cracks the prelims in his third attempt. I hope the folks in TVF who created Aspirants and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who made 12th Fail, will never get to watch this movie. Because it might depress them, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra might even lash out at them. There are even wilder ideas in the film, just to glorify the insensitivity of a guy with childhood trauma.
In order to address Dhanush’s Hindi diction, they have made him a Tamilian by origin, with Prakash Raj playing his father, and they both share dialogues in Tamil. But the vocabulary of the dialogues given to Dhanush is such that one can sense he has clearly memorized his lines rather than feeling them. The grasping of accent that usually happens when you are in a place for a long time is not there in Dhanush’s performance, and that clearly makes the character unintentionally funny in some of the most intense sequences. Kriti Sanon is playing this character who transitions from being ultra naive to female Devdas. Even though one could see a lot of physical strain in the way she carries the character in the present-day phase, the poor writing just won’t let you root for that performance. Priyanshu Painyuli is wasted in that friend character. Tota Roy Chowdhary’s character is straight out of an 80s film, who insults the hero by talking about lineage and poverty. Prakash Raj doesn’t have much to do here. Aanand L Rai has managed to rope in talented names like Vineeth Kumar Singh and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub in mostly inconsequential roles.
There was this movie named Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana, which had a similar theme where the hero decides to become an IAS and tries to take revenge on the girl who dumped him. Tere Ishk Mein is almost like what if that movie had a bigger budget to include some greenscreen war sequences. If they had narrated this story in a grounded setup, judging the problematic politics of this movie would have been difficult. But Tere Ishk Mein is almost like a filmmaking resistance to uphold misogyny because they seem to be running out of ideas to create good love stories.
