Bhumi Pednekar and Rajkummar Rao’s Badhaai do is creating quite a stir. Based on the concept of lavender marriage, the trailer shows Rao and Pednekar’s characters, who are homosexual, getting into a marriage of convenience to continue to stay with their respective partners. Some section of the audience, however, feel that, in an attempt to tell queer stories, Bollywood ends up using serious life-threatening issues faced by them as elements of humour.
When News18.com asked Bhumi for her opinion on what the audience felt, she said that it is too soon to judge and showed great confidence in her film. The actress told us, “I feel it is a little too soon to judge what the film is. You’re seeing two-and-a-half minutes of a montage from a two and a half-hour story. How can you judge it?”
She continued, “I know it’s a very sensitive film. It is about two characters that have gotten into a lavender marriage setting but it is not a concept-driven film about a lavender marriage. At no point are we saying that this is the right thing to do or not the right thing to do. We need to understand that there are many members of the LGBTQI community that might not have the same journey as some others. These are characters and nothing is ever black or white, so we can’t look at everything from the same lens. But I don’t want to comment on this much because I’m very, very confident that a lot of these questions that have risen will be answered when the film is released.
Talking about playing a lesbian character on screen for the first time, and whether she had any apprehensions about it, she said, “Playing a queer character was not a big deal for me, because I have grown up with queer friends and with many people that belong to the community. When I see same-sex couples, I don’t see them from a different lens. There have been many stories that have come my way in the past, about characters that belong to the queer community. But the sensitivity with which Badhaai Do has been written is something that really stood out.”
Bhumi also added that she was not afraid of not being able to bring authenticity to the character and end up misrepresenting the said community. She reasoned, “The script was written with sensitivity and there was so much research and a lot of due diligence. So much was done on the scriptwriting level that we did not have a lot of red flags. At no point did we use the characters and their sexual preference to create humour. They are not the bait for humour in our film and that’s something refreshing. Badhaai Do is very empathetic and is full of compassion. The politics of the film is absolutely correct, which is why Raj (Rajkummar Rao) and I agreed to do it.”
She concluded, “The film is not trying to address any issues as such. We are trying to normalize the idea of homosexuality because society is so uncomfortable with the thought of it. We can normalize it when we have families that come together and watch our film. When you laugh together while watching it, you start questioning yourself the reason for laughing. And that’s what makes you think. We want this to reach out to people that are going through a similar situation.”
Directed by Harshvardhan Kulkarni, Badhaai Do will be released in theatres on February 11.
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