This movie contains an entire wedding party being taken hostage, but the violence within Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam is largely cartoonish and unthreatening. At one point, heavily armed henchmen break into a house and are easily trounced by a group of middle-aged women armed only with heavy sticks. Let’s repeat that. Professional criminals and thugs with machine guns get their butts kicked by a group of angry aunties. That makes it clear Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam is a kids’ movie, one with an important message of women’s liberation, but also one that can’t quite figure out exactly what that liberation means.
Krish (Aashim Gulati) owns his own cramming school, Krishna’s Koaching Klasses (oh dear), and for fun crashes various weddings. He is also such a dope he doesn’t know a bridal sari when he sees one, so he is pretty surprised when he is rescued from a gangster wedding by the bride, the gangster’s daughter, Meera (Dhvani Bhanushali, and more on whom later). Meera, who recently returned to India from three years in Australia, has no problem with an upbringing so conservative women are expected to veil their faces within their own home, nor with the fact that her parents have arranged her marriage to an unimportant groom. She is also totally disinterested in her father’s career choice or his scary reputation.
No, the issue here is that her crimelord father (Rajesh Sharma) arranged the marriage without her knowledge. So obviously she has run off, leaving all her guests at her father’s mercy, so he learns the important lesson of asking for her consent before marrying her off. For his part, once Krish realizes the world of trouble he is in, he is beside himself with fear, since he has already met Meera’s scary brothers (played by Vikram Kochhar and Himansh Kohli) as well as their enforcer, the delightfully named Cousin Baby (Vikas Verma). So obviously, Krish and Meera have no choice but to get into various light-hearted shenanigans while Meera decides on her future.
The shenanigans largely involve Krish’s friendly and supportive family, including an Instagram-obsessed grandmother who also DJs professionally. His mother (Sonali Sachdev) runs that group of stick-carrying ladies, obviously modeled on the Pink Saris, but who also leaps to assumptions when Krish brings home Meera in her wedding finery. Mr. Gulati is the dictionary definition of a non-threatening crush and ladles on the puppy-dog charm to help us ignore the inconsistencies of his characterization.
Ms. Bhanushali, a pop singer for whom this is her film debut, plays Meera with a significantly tougher edge than the rest of the movie involves. Her frustration and unhappiness grounds the clownish silliness of mistaken identities, wild assumptions, and ridiculous hijinks – all emphasized with cartoonish musical cues – in just the right amount of reality. That cynicism is also why the gormless Krish might actually have any appeal for Meera. Only Ms. Bhanushali’s performance reminds the audience of the genuine seriousness of the issues here.
Watching this movie as someone outside Indian culture made me think about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and how radical that movie really is from a global perspective. The idea that women have the right to self-determination, the right to do as they please with their own bodies, and the right to choose their own partner is still extremely open-minded in certain parts of the world. The fact it remains necessary to hammer these points again and again is very depressing, but director Saurabh Dasgupta, working from a script by Laxman Utekar and Rishi Virmani, has done good work in maintaining a cheery vibe that should go over well with a preteen girl audience. For the rest of us, it’s a potent reminder of how far the global conversation about the rights of women really has to go.
Though in all fairness to the movie, the foolish Krish has a pair of equally foolish roommates who are also a gay couple. Even the meanest of the thugs chasing Meera accepts them without comment, and the jokes at their expense are about their stupidity, not their sexuality. Maybe true equality will be when a pair of lesbians could be treated the same.
Kahan Shuru Kahan Khatam is now playing in limited theaters.
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