In Tarun Dudeja’s road trip film, four women undertake the hyper-masculine ritual of riding their bikes from Delhi to Ladakh, and find themselves through each other
There is so much to a film than just the film in Hindi cinema these days. Today, a film is a result of its branding, by which I mean the reputation it amasses by virtue of its cast, its plot, and its aesthetic. Films with star power are demarcated for the big screen, the rest of it is swiftly classified as an OTT film, a crude way to suggest the currency of Indian attention span that remains content in enabling the male-dominated star system.
The message after all, matters first, then comes the medium. That is to say, it’s not enough for a film to have a story, filmmakers now need to ask themselves: What story is my film selling and is it selling it well? It’s these two answers that dictate not just the fate of a film but more importantly, whether it ends up being dismissed or received with all-out enthusiasm.
In the case of Tarun Dudeja’s Dhak Dhak, a coming-of-age road trip movie about four women undertaking the hyper-masculine ritual of riding their bikes from Delhi to Ladakh’s Khardung La, the answer is both obvious and surprising. Think Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara or Sooraj Barjatya’s Uunchai but with a cheeky gender reversal. Starring Ratna Pathak Shah, Dia Mirza, Fatima Sana Sheikh, and Sanjana Sanghi, at first glance, Dhak Dhak can easily be slotted as an OTT film.
Women as headliners
That it is a film that made its way to the theatres undercuts a barrier that often comes in the way of films where women take up space and screentime without reserving it for male heroes. Similar to Karan Boolani’s recently released Thank You For Coming, a coming-of-age sex comedy starring four women, Dhak Dhak has a female producer to boot — actress Taapsee Pannu (her production house is cheekily named Outsider Productions).
That’s worth mentioning simply because even in 2023, a film starring four female actors is seen first as a liability. It takes a certain kind of pluck for a produce to hold their ground and not take the easy way out. By all accounts, if Dhak Dhak “dropped” on Netflix or Prime Video, it would have perhaps made better business sense. It would have then also toed the general perception of films needing men to be deemed valuable.
That Pannu and her co-producers chose to shoulder the risk of an indifferent audience sends a long overdue reminder that one of the main reasons that Hindi cinema remains so skewed towards the whims of men is primarily because Indian audiences have continued to let its heroines down. That means that mounting any film that stars more than one actress remains a daunting prospect. It either has to attain every level of perfection or risk empty theatres, lesser number of shows, and diminished interest. Failure is the only constant that any producer backing films headlined by women keep facing. That they still persist is both a moment of joy and woe.
A route to self-discovery
In that sense, perhaps the biggest letdown of Dhak Dhak is that Dudeja plays by the book, appearing a little hesitant to upend the shackles of male-focused storytelling. The film squanders its own potential to chart a new path, instead occasionally seeming content in rewriting a familiar story with a different gender. Still, it’s not a film without smarts or pleasures.
The story opens with Sky (Sheikh), a social media influencer with a traumatic past getting a group of women together who can accompany her on the road trip. First comes Mahi (a magnetic Pathak Shah), a widowed Punjabi grandmother who sees the opportunity to ride the motorbike to one of the world’s highest motorable roads as a way to get out of the invisible life she leads at home.
Uzma (Mirza) joins the duo on account of being a bike mechanic although her identity is really stifled in a toxic marriage and Manjari (Sanghi), an under confident woman about to get married looking for one last adventure, rounds out the quartet. Naturally, all four women confront ideas of their agency and identity on the journey, clashing with each other and eventually finding themselves through each other.
A Ratna Pathak Shah masterclass
The writing is sloppy in parts, held together by its observational eye and the chemistry of its protagonists. By the time the halfway mark rolls in, the 140-minute runtime seems bloated especially since the film (the screenplay is by Dudeja and Parijat Joshi) doesn’t appear to head in any challenging directions or offer any fresh remedies.
In fact, given how neat and predictable the backstories of each of the four women are, I wish the casting was slightly more dangerous. Sanghi, for instance, is miscast in a role that could do with an actor with instinctive comic timing. Similarly, Mirza feels once again unfairly slotted as the subservient Muslim wife of an ungrateful husband, a role that she just played in the second season of Made in Heaven.
It’s not that Mirza isn’t a competent actor, it’s more that she plays Uzma fairly straight, a performance that feels laced with déjà vu given that it feels similar to her Made in Heaven character in scope and leap. Sheikh suits the part, but her turn comes across slightly uneven, which feels even more lacklustre in the scenes she shares with Pathak Shah, who fires on all fronts, even with a shaky Punjabi accent.
Even though her character felt cut from the same cloth as Buaji from Lipstick Under My Burkha, she lends Mahi an unhinged physical alertness that somehow affords her an air of mystery. It is films like Dhak Dhak that act as a prompt for Pathak Shah’s quiet brilliance — her ability to hold a film together without calling attention to herself.
This is the actress operating at the peak of her craft and if anything, Dhak Dhak needs to be celebrated for affording Pathak Shah — one of the finest actors who has historically rescued Hindi cinema from itself — an uninterrupted playground to have fun.
