Very fragmented notes on Tanu Weds Manu Returns

-- What a goofily ungrammatical-sounding title. Reminds me of the famous promotional tagline for The Birds, which got pedants all worked up: “The birds is coming” (with the “B” deliberately in lower-case).

-- As must already have been noted hundreds of times elsewhere, Tanu Weds Manu Returns is a triumph for Kangana Ranaut as well as for an ensemble of supporting performers, including Deepak Dobriyal, Swara Bhaskar, Eijaz Khan and Jimmy Shergill reprising their roles from the first film. This is one of those rare times where I wished a sequel would expand into a full-fledged franchise, so we can keep revisiting these performers in these roles, not necessarily to see where they will end up (chances are this lot will keep going round in circles, creating new complications for themselves), but to eavesdrop on conversations, observe shifting equations, and see more of those crowded family functions where the less predictable facets of small-town Indian life may be revealed.

-- This film belongs to the tradition of what Stanley Cavell called “the comedy of remarriage” – a reference to the many wonderful screwball comedies in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood where married couples broke up and explored other possibilities as a necessary prelude to the realisation that they couldn’t do without each other in the long run. (And this was something that most people around them could usually see before they could. Though in some cases there was also a subconscious little waltz going on, centred on the thrill of waiting it out, playing the game without quite acknowledging it.)

Classics in that subgenre include His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story and My Favorite Wife. Cary Grant was a vital force in all of those films, and I think this had a lot to do with one of his most distinctive qualities as an actor, which David Thomson drew attention to in a once-infamous essay: Grant’s ability to tap into the light and dark shades of his personality simultaneously, never allowing one to drown out the other. That quality was particularly effective in films like His Girl Friday, where, despite the generally manic tone, you always got a sense of an internal conflict: the man battling with himself, both drawn to and put off by (or intimidated by) the woman; the playing out of that conflict, up to the realisation that one feeling carries more weight than the other. 

In contrast, the Manu of Tanu Weds Manu Returns is bland, hard to read, and something of a non-entity, both at the script level and in R Madhavan’s pleasant but workmanlike performance. And this may have been deliberate. Both Tanu Weds Manu and its sequel often toy with the complexities of gender equations in a seemingly conservative society: how women can be the ones to take initiatives or assert themselves in contexts where you wouldn’t always expect it. But I wonder if the current discourse about empowering and giving more agency to women characters in our cinema is about to lead to a situation where the men in some films have almost no agency or personality. (See the Rajkummar Rao character in Queen, for instance.) Manu is a cipher here; the viewer gets very little sense of what is going on in his head. 

 -- Delightful though it is on many levels, I’m not sure TWM Returns works too well as a remarriage-comedy in the sense that Cavell used the term. One problem being that I was less than convinced by the Tanu-Manu romance in the first film: first a dreamy-eyed NRI falls in love with a sleeping girl, then the girl (who turns out to be a madcap whenever she is awake) falls gradually in love with the idea of someone being so much in love with her. If you find that unconvincing, it isn’t so easy to invest in the sequel’s conviction that these two people have to get back together, so what if a vulnerable young college-goer gets caught up in their courtship dance.

The opening of this film pointedly contrasts the noisy camaraderie of a large middle-class Indian wedding (I can’t get “Sun Sahiba Sun” out of my head now) with cold and gloomy England, where Tanu – who draws so much of her energy from being around people – only has pigeons and raccoons for company. If you were truly deeply moved by the Tanu-Manu romance in the first film, you’re supposed to be shaken by what they have turned into, by this dark winter of the soul (which can only be healed by a return to sunny, clamorous India). But the quarreling couple we see in the asylum scene is pretty much how I would have expected the two people from the first film to wind up a few years after their wedding. (My wife is bipolar, Manu tells the doctors, and we are invited to read this as a manifestation of his resentment rather than as a balanced diagnosis. But one thing that neither film has ever addressed full-on – though Kangana’s performance screams it out in nearly every scene – is that Tanu is a bit of a nut, and possibly dangerous too. Her expressions during the bonfire scene in the first film still make me shiver.)

-- Though the supporting cast, and most of the dialogue, in TWM Returns is so sharp that the pace is never allowed to flag for long, it comes close a few times: notably in the exasperating scene where Datto’s brother gives a little lecture to his family and community about the need to value women. Again, a byproduct of the New Indian Cinema where the need to be self-consciously progressive and socially responsible is sometimes prioritised over narrative flow or internal credibility. (But since Anand L Rai is the director who got so much flak for Raanjhanaa, I won’t go on about this. Perhaps he just felt the need to spell things out.)

-- There is also a nod to the great cinematic theme of obsessive remaking, casting a lookalike in the mould of your idealised love – a theme that has anchored films as otherwise disparate as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, V Shantaram’s Navrang and Yash Chopra’s Lamhe. Tanu Weds Manu Returns briefly flirts with the idea, as in the scene where Manu scrutinises Datto when she tries on the earrings he has given her; in a different sort of film, this might have been close to the creepy scene in Vertigo where Scottie waits for Judy to emerge from the bathroom, made up as Madeleine. But again, Manu is such a blank slate that you can’t ascribe many such motivations to him. And the film, being essentially lighthearted in tone, isn’t trying to go down that particular vortex; it remains a sidenote.

(But I’ll still use this opportunity to link to this terrific Adam Gopnik story about death, replacement, love, pet fish and Hitchcock’s blondes. Read.)

-- Having begun this post by mentioning pedants, let me be one myself. People, stop calling Tanu Weds Manu the “prequel” to this film. (This means you too, Wikipedia.) A prequel is a specific sort of sequel – it isn’t a synonym for “precursor” or “predecessor”. Look it up. Yes, I know we are living in a world where “anyways” will soon replace “anyway” in the OED, but let’s beat back the gathering ravens for as long as we can.