Badhaai Do

Shardul is a policeman, Suman is a PE teacher. Both are under family pressure to marry and both have something to hide: he is gay, she is a lesbian. They come to an arrangement and marry, then try to live separate lives inside one house, in full view of everyone. Harshavardhan Kulkarni directs. Rajkummar Rao plays Shardul and Bhumi Pednekar plays Suman. Mainstream Indian cinema had not taken this subject on at this scale before. The film came after the 2018 judgment decriminalising homosexuality, and its point is that the judgment did not automatically change life: the law moved, the family, the neighbourhood and the workplace did not. Its chosen mode is comedy rather than tragedy. It proceeds as situation comedy throughout, but the jokes are built on the lie surrounding the characters rather than at their expense. Rao's work inside the police uniform is particularly worth watching: the character has to hide from the authority his own job represents. Who it is for: viewers interested in the shifting social terrain of Indian cinema and in the family comedy form. Who it is not for: it is long and pushes the emotional register hard in the final section, and the families come round more easily than they would.