There are two approaches to watching Dream Girl 2. You can get offended at the film’s lack of sophistication, its unwieldy handling of everything from gender to body, age to sexual orientation and its overall un-wokenness. Or you can just cast everything aside and opt to laugh through (most of) it. I chose the latter. We all are in need of a laugh. And given the times we live in, a film ranks pretty low on the scale of things to get offended about.
To begin with, Dream Girl 2 is pretty funny. That is not unexpected given the vast ensemble of comic talents present. Annu Kapoor, Vijay Raaz, Abhishek Banerjee and Manjot Singh return from the first film, which became a Rs 100- crore hit when it was released in 2019. Dream Girl 2 is a spiritual sequel to Dream Girl and many of the returning actors play characters different from the first film. In addition, there are Paresh Rawal, Asrani, Rajpal Yadav, Manoj Joshi, Ranjan Raj and Seema Pahwa, all of whom have the unmistakable capability of tickling the funny bone with alacrity.
Ayushmann Khurrana, the beating heart of the first film as he is of the sequel, returns to play Karam, a small-town boy married to a life of constant jugaad. In Dream Girl, Karam had to fake his way through a series of sticky situations by posing to be Pooja, a call-centre employee whose voice reels in many more admirers than ‘she’ can handle.In the second film, Karam’s dwindling fortunes, debt- ridden life and strict deadline to make enough money to marry his girlfriend Pari (played by Ananya Panday) compels the master of impersonation to return to being Pooja, butthis time more in the flesh and with much more to do. For Pooja comes with the unofficial tagline: “Smart phones se zyada features mujh mein hain.”
Pooja doubles as a bar dancer as well as a ‘psychiatrist’. The latter lands her in the home of a wealthy family whose patriarch, Abu Saleem played by Paresh Rawal, not only wants Pooja to treat his depressed son but also, in a twist of fate, marry him. The rest of Dream Girl 2 shifts between being a sometimes coherent-sometimes confused comedy of errors replete with mistaken identities, crazy misunderstandings and laugh-out- loud gags.
Dream Girl 2 functions as a broad-strokes comedy, with director Raaj Shaandilyaa and co- writer Naresh Kathooria working with the single-minded focus of piling on one comic set piece after another. Most of them work, especially because Dream Girl 2’s one-liner game is strong. Every actor gets at least a few delightful comic lines to pull off with relish (it may sound silly but I actually laughed out loud when a character looks at an old, leering drunk in a bar and remarks: “Shakti nahin hain lekin Shakti Kapoor bacha hain”, with the film showcasing a vast smorgasbord of comic acting — from Rajpal Yadav’s physical comedy to Vijay Raaz’s subtle humour.
A large part of Dream Girl 2 works well in the first half, with the cross-gender comedy staying true to the tradition of pure-bred nautanki and reining itself in even in situations where itteeters on the brink of the class-crass divide. Ayushmann delightfully inhabits the character of Pooja, getting the physicality spot-on, and the rest of the players sportingly jump onto the bandwagon, ready to do all it takes to take the audience on a fun ride. There is an attemptto keep the writing topical and relevant with mentions of Covid-19, demonetisation, the Sri Lankan economic crisis and even Gadar 2 and Pathaan, with pop-culture symbols like BTS and Kapil Sharma also creeping into the dialogues.
However, the comic set-pieces are not enough to sustain a wafer- thin plot over a runtime of 133 minutes. In Half Two, Dream Girl 2 runs out of steam. For starters, there is absolutely zero chemistry between Ayushmann and Ananya and the Karam-Pari love story seems more incidental than integral to the plot. The film starts relying on repetitive sequences and an overstretched scene in a restaurant that is directly lifted from that rather iconic scene from Mrs. Doubtfire, with not even half the impact that Robin Williams pulled off in that film, perhaps the most seminal among cross-dressing comedies as it were.
Dream Girl 2 also wants to show its progressive core. So we have inter-religious marriages happening without the bat of an eyelid, a few neoteric nods to the LGBTQIA+ community and Sunny Leone being referred to as a “pyaari bachchi”. However, it is its chaotic DNA that Dream Girl 2 wants to stick to largely, and save for a lengthy, preachy speech at the end which does the film no favours, it more or less sticks to the memo.
