Toilet: Ek Prem Katha Hindi Movie

Feature Film | 2017 | UA | Comedy, Drama, Romantic
Critics:
Audience:
Toilet - Ek Premium Katha is a propaganda film, which attempts to tackle a serious issue of hygiene and open defecation but fails to make an impact.
Aug 11, 2017 By Manisha Lakhe


An out and out propaganda film, this Bollywood offering attempts to tackle a serious issue of hygiene and open defecation by taking a real life story and dramatising it. A bride actually left her marital home because she discovered they did not have toilets.


One hour into the movie, you begin to wonder how much more romance you are going to see between Keshav (played by a very earnest Akshay Kumar) and Jaya (Bhoomi Pednekar, very empathetic and beautiful). This romance is sweet, but for the ever present third wheel: Keshav's younger brother played by Divyendu Sharma, who is so over the top villager, so grating on the senses (not only because he's shown to be watching 'Balam Pichkari' on the phone all the time) that villagers should cover him up with a blanket and throw him in the middle of a herd of stampeding cows for saying 'Mallika Bhabhi' to the cow and 'milk' in the same sentence again and again.


It's a reality that village women are not safe any more. They get attacked by wild animals and are bitten by snakes and scorpions when they defecate in the open, and raped by men. But is this film an answer?


The hero tries everything for his new bride. He even takes her on the motorbike to the train, which stops for seven minutes and she can finish her business. But it doesn't answer the question: what do you do when you have to go during the day?


It is in the second half of the film where the story actually takes off. Jaya forces his hand. She knows, this 'jugaad' of going to the train every day will not work. She leaves him. The filmmakers then speed up the film because they have to make the story work. The hero needs to believe that hygiene and safety are important and have a change of heart, then the father of the hero (played without a fault by Sudhir Pandey), the villagers need to understand. The hero goes to the municipal authorities who need to change their attitude about providing toilets to the villages. The hero's father needs to see why they need a toilet installed at home, the old granny needs to see the same, the family of the heroine need to show support to her cause, her mother needs to change her mindset... So many things are crammed into the second half of the film you just watch it untouched. You realise that you have watched all this without feeling a thing. You have no empathy when the village women come marching into courts demanding 'saamoohik divorce' (mass divorce) from their husbands if they don't get toilets installed.


The need of the hour is providing public toilets and teaching the masses to use these toilets instead of defecating and polluting rivers and ponds. But is this film any more than the filmmakers genuflecting to the government? Paying deep obeisance to the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India campaign)? That sort of stinks, methinks.

Manisha Lakhe

   

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