Daadi Ki Shaadi

Ashish R Mohan's story is weak at the very foundation level. Ashish R Mohan, Bunty Rathore and Saahil S Sharma's screenplay has its share of entertaining scenes. But at the same time, the loopholes are aplenty and negate the impact of a few positives. Bunty Rathore's dialogues are decent. Ashish R Mohan's direction fails to repair the faults in the script. He tries his best to pepper the narrative with humour and emotions. He has also mounted the film on a fine scale and shot it magnificently. The basic plot gives a déjà vu of films like BAWARCHI [1972], COOLIE NO 1 [1995], BAGHBAN [2003], CHUPKE CHUPKE [1975] etc. However, the aforementioned films were backed by solid scripts, which this film doesn’t have.

Still, it is difficult to completely dismiss Daadi Ki Shaadi because its heart is in the right place. In an era increasingly shaped by nuclear families and emotional distance, the film addresses a growing social issue: elderly parents abandoned emotionally even when materially comfortable. Vimla’s loneliness feels painfully real and the film deserves credit for centering that experience within a mainstream entertainer. For all its over-the-top execution, the film’s compassion ultimately shines through. It may exhaust you with its noise but it also reminds you, quite movingly at times, that growing old should not mean becoming invisible within one’s own family.

The music is quite forgettable, though visually, the film is pleasing to look at. The hills of Shimla bring softness and serenity to the otherwise chaotic family drama. Overall, Daadi Ki Shaadi has a few genuinely funny moments and heartfelt emotions, but it ultimately becomes a drag because it cannot decide what it truly wants to say. In trying to become a social commentary on modern families, the film overloads itself with messaging, and somewhere in all that noise, its emotional core gets lost.

The execution is — there’s no other way to put itn — a drag. The reason, as always, is in the weak writing, and flat TV sitcom treatment, in which scenes are created with everyone lined up in the frame, waiting their turn to speak, before exiting: case in point, where the younger generation, Zs and Alphas, show their greedy, selfish millennial parents the error of their ways, and claim that Daadi, and her home, under attack by her own offspring, is where their hearts lie. It begins well enough, even if the likeable Kapil Sharma looks much too old to be a potential life-partner of Khateeb’s character: hard to swallow that they were in college together, and are circling back to each other nearly a decade later; easier to believe that she isn’t too happy with the match, having set her eyes on a career and a life abroad.