TU JHOOTHI MAIN MAKKAAR (TJMM) is a beautiful lie across the board. It’s a beautiful fairy-tale that presents a beautiful picture of Delhi’s “Lala” families, and their beautiful intricate relationships. It’s about beautiful people dancing and singing beautiful songs in beautiful locations.
It also , however, presents beautiful lies…biggy style. People meeting for the first-time on a vacation don’t talk like the way they do here, and fall in love so easily. Complexities in relationships don’t get resolved with such ease, and minimal friction as depicted here. Since this is a Luv Ranjan film, you can expect monologues. And there are a lot of them…some of them land while the others don’t. After all, Ranbir Kapoor is no Kartik Aaryan!
Yet everything that we’ve always wanted in a good, big-screen family entertainer is all here. Locations, performances, witty dialogues (and some pretty cringy ones too, but so did all those Govinda movies that we still laugh at!!), terrific music, actors actually singing and dancing, and the great Indian family. Not to forget, of course, a message…and why not? Aren’t we now 21st century moviegoers and want every film to have one.
We are spoilt as an Indian audience. Most of us have watched Bollywood grow leaps and bounds over the past two decades, coming out with films that have a social message, where people don’t randomly break into a song and dance routine anymore (unless it’s the obligatory end credits sequence), and where the comedy and the emotions need to measure up against some scale or a barometer.
TJMM took me back into the old-fashioned rom-coms that we’ve grown to love (and still watch re-runs of, albeit discreetly on the small screen). However, it also checks the boxes that we want today’s smart films to have, in the form of a kickass message…or at least a potent topic of table discussion.
I had said that if PATHAN did not star SRK, I probably would not have seen that film. TJMM, however, is one that I would still have seen, even if it was minus Ranbir Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor.
This is an ensemble film, where everyone gets to contribute. There are no standout performances and hardly any letdowns. There are no winners or losers for what the film tries to convey. It takes no sides and simply states the facts. The harsh truth of our society.
In the end, though, amidst all the lies, the deceit and the critically-panned monologues that it offers, it is Pritam’s music, Amitabh Bhattacharya’s lyrics and Luv Ranjan’s assured direction that forces us to embrace this beautiful lie. Go watch it. Hey, I will watch it again on the OTT and there’s no need for me to lie about it!
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