Now, until this movie, I hadn’t quite ever thought of what it might be like for a man to be a ‘gynaec’
A still from the film
Film: ‘Doctor G’
Director: Anubhuti Kashyap
Cast: Ayushmann Khurrana, Rakul Preet
Rating: 3/5
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This is, at its core, a film about gender/sexual relations, meaning men, and women — between the young and the old; indeed, among the old, and among the young.
Once you get that, it becomes simple to navigate this warm space. Not that this is some turgid treatise on gender studies which, strangely enough, was a successor to ‘women’s studies’ in academics!
Likewise, a character in the hospital/med-school here makes a pertinent point about how the cancer department is referred to as ‘kark rog’ (cancer disease), while the gynaecology section is termed ‘stree rog’. As if stree (the woman) is the disease!
Actor Ayushmann Khurrana plays a student in the gynaecology department in med-school. Now, until this movie, I hadn’t quite ever thought of what it might be like for a man to be a ‘gynaec’.
Unless you consider a conversation I once had with writer Javed Akhtar about how his brother Salman, then a medical student, had a choice to either specialise in psychiatry, or gynaecology.
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Young Javed insisted Salman take up psychiatry, for sure — because he would become famous some day, and it’d be embarrassing (for him) that his brother was a gynaec! Even there, the thought on my mind was how Javed was so certain that he’d be famous!
The MBBS male-lead here is similarly split between becoming a gynaecologist, or an orthopaedic. Actually he’s determined to specialise in the latter. Only that he hasn’t scored enough to gain admission into the course of his choice. Hence, he lands up in a populous class in a possibly unpopular position of being the only man in it.
Now we know how desis pursuing either engineering or medicine, upon parental pressure, is a recurring lament in pop-culture. Except, that there are too many films/series shining a light on the mechanics inside engineering campuses. Surprisingly, not as many for medical. This is a relatively rare film, in that regard. The only guy, in a class of all girls, is getting hazed/ragged non-stop, as you’d imagine.
To be sure, this isn’t a Munnabhai MBBS (2003) sort of LOL comedy. Wherein scenes are layered over layers, to elicit endless laughs. That great Chaplinesque visceral humour, I feel, is hardest to pull off, without descending to annoying slapstick anyway. Neither is Doctor G to a maternity ward, what Khurrana’s strikingly risky/brave debut, Vicky Donor (2012), was to the fertility clinic.
Which is also to say, yes, this picture kinda falls into a confused space a lot of the times — and you may have to patiently engage with the characters, in order to absorb what it is that they’re really going through, and how that makes sense for the point the picture is trying to make, eventually.
Quite a few elemental, humanist points, actually — to do with a society so sexually separated/segregated, that it’s essential to express them, through media/classroom/home/everywhere, all the time.
Khurrana’s character, for one, has fallen for a classmate (Rakul Preet Singh, seemingly not so much in form, I’m afraid) who, in turn, is already engaged to someone else. That doesn’t stop the guy from being the try-sexual still.
He can’t read signals, because his social conditioning has rendered his receptors incapable! That these two male-female leads are from separate religions is gently slipped in as well — for how should it matter; and that’s a fine touch too.
The absolutely riveting Sheeba Chaddha plays an old woman seeking love in the times of Tinder. Above all else, of course, is the gynaec coming to terms with his female patients, where the clinical-touch is supreme. And shouldn’t all physical touch be inevitably genderless anyway, when it isn’t consensually sexual?
Doctor G is director Anubhuti Kashyap’s debut feature. Which evidently comes with its own occupational hazard of saying as much as you can, at one go. But then again, the heartening fact is that she has a voice, by which I mean she actually has something to say — and can execute it entertainingly enough.
My only concern stepping out of the theatre was why too many people weren’t talking about it as much, before I stepped in! And this probably has something to do with a prevailing notion that the sort of subjects star-actor Khurrana has championed so far — amusingly challenging societal taboos; films like Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Badhaai Ho, Article 15, etc, including Doctor G — have turned into a thing of home entertainment.
As against the theatrical hoopla that they were — heartwarmingly minting it at the box-office, before pandemic. I hope that’s not permanently the case, and merely a minor phase.
For, societal walls being questioned, if not crashing down, even reversing of the male gaze, in the collective experience of disparate crowds at the cinemas, is what popular pictures must aim for, always; no? Yes, to this.
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