'Shaadi Ke Side Effects' Looking into a Marriage, with a Smile

The second-half deliberately forfeits the blithe spirit in pursuit of a more penetrating perspective on marital woes. Even when the film loses a lightness of touch, it nonetheless remains even-pitched preferring understatement to hysteria. Again, a lot of the credit for the narrative's correct pitch must go to the two principal actors. Vidya looks better than ever before. Radiant and expectant as a pregnant woman in the initial scenes, she glides into the zone of paranoid motherhood with plenty of panache. In the later scenes, when she tries to deck herself up to rejuvenate her husband’s attention, Vidya reminded me of Sharmila Tagore in Basu Bhattacharya's marital drama "Grihapravesh".

Sprinting as far away as possible from the world of Milkha Singh as possible, Farhan is every inch the harried husband here, partly man party boy, he's looking for a boys' night out without feeling guilty about leaving the wife home with the baby. If Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Basu Chatterjee and Basu Bhattacharya were to come together to mull on that thing called marriage, the resultant celluloid exposition would probably be "Shaadi Ke Side Effects". Not that this cute nugget of a film can proximate the excellence of any of the above filmmakers, but it tries to be wispy and witty without getting unnecessarily polemical on the subject of urban marriages.

A warm, funny, thought-provoking take on the man-woman equation, director Saket Chaudhary gets it bang on. The chemistry between Farhan and Vidya crackles and hisses with tantalizing tension. Brittle and yet supple, the lead pair's chemistry irons out the film's uneven edges. I wish the peripheral characters were written and played better. Purab Kohi as the nosy neighbour (he reminded me of the role he plays in that coffee ad with Karan Johar and Deepika Padukone) and Vir Das as the boorish manifestation of Farhan's character's bachelor fantasies, offer interesting possibilities but stop short of being a support system in this drama marital discontent.

Nope. You can't take your eyes off Farhan and Vidya. They look evenly matched and entirely yummy in their yin and yang yearnings. You do wonder why the script takes them to Australia. But then marriage does make people do strange things, right?

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