In the climactic scene of the 1991 film, Sadak, the heroine Pooja (Pooja Bhatt) jumps from the roof of a burning three-story building and lands directly in the arms of her lover, Ravi (Sanjay Dutt). Ravi, who kills multiple people (including a police officer) in the movie, barely receives a jail sentence and the movie ends with the couple living happily. This wacky script, which somehow made Sadak One of the top ten highest grossing films of 1991, it hardly deserves cult status, let alone a resurrection in 2020.
However, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt clearly thought otherwise. So here we are with Sadak 2, starring Alia Bhatt and Aditya Roy Kapur, along with Sanjay Dutt, who reprises the role of Ravi, from the 1991 film. Sadak 2It recently premiered on Disney + Hotstar and has since accumulated one of the lowest ratings on IMDB and has been criticized by almost every movie critic, and rightly so. As a sequel, Sadak 2 has some thematic similarities to its predecessor.
In the 1991 movie, for example, a young couple, Pooja and Ravi, hit the road to escape the villain, a eunuch brothel owner named Maharani, who wants to force Pooja into prostitution. In the new movie, Aarya (Alia) and Vishal (Aditya Roy Kapur) also embark on a road trip to Kailash Parvat along with Ravi (Dutt), so they can escape from the evil Guruji Gyaan Prakash, who, we are told, it had something to do with the death of Aarya’s mother. Both trips, by Pooja and Ravi, as well as by Aarya and Vishal, are marked by betrayals, struggles and uncertainties. But the similarities end here. Except for the premise and Sanjay Dutt, the two films have little in common. While the older movie has its roots in reality, despite being pulpy, the new one seems absolutely synthetic. Vishal (Aditya Roy Kapur), for example, comes out after being in prison, with an owl and a guitar as if he’s not in jail but at Hogwarts.
In the older film, like many of Mahesh Bhatt’s films, we witness a broader commentary on society, as we witness a nexus between corrupt police officers and street vendors of prostitution, and how that affects women of low-income families. We have a formidable villain in the brothel owner Maharani, brilliantly played by Sadashiv Amrapurkar. The movie not only shows us that Maharani is evil, it also describes that she is a victim of circumstance. In Sadak 2However, the story of a corrupt man god is one tap and go, and the main villain isn’t quite the big reveal the script wants him to be.
While there were many absurdities in 1991 Sadak, the film stayed true to its own internal logic. Ravi, who lost his sister (Soni Razdan) after Maharani forced her into prostitution, seizes the opportunity to ‘save’ Pooja when he finds her heading towards the same circumstances.
Dutt’s Ravi in the previous film was not only a well-written character, but also someone who describes the struggles of dealing with mental health issues with complexity and nuance. A taxi driver, Ravi becomes a chronic insomniac and has acute panic attacks and anxiety after witnessing his sister’s suicide. The guilt of not being able to save her gnaws at his heart for 7 years. It’s a very delicate portrait of someone dealing with persistent pain and depression, for which Dutt also received critical acclaim.
In the new movie that is Sadak 2, we find Dutt in distress again. This time for the death of his wife, Pooja. But, here he talks to his dead wife, and his ghost wife is very capable of carrying on conversations. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that Pooja’s ghost (voiced by Pooja Bhatt) has more dialogue than Aditya Roy Kapur in the movie. Ravi smells Pooja’s saris, argues with her, and is so resigned and purposeless after her death, that he tries to kill himself but fails. The film begins with Dutt sitting in what appears to be a psychiatric ward of a hospital, where the doctor speaks in metaphors and asks to be admitted to the psychiatric hospital.
A mental hospital, in fact, seems to be the answer to all the mental health problems in these two films, and clearly no one in Mahesh Bhatt’s world has ever heard of counselors or psychologists before. Alia Bhatt’s character Aarya, whom her family members are trying to prove to be mentally unstable, is also released from the same psychiatric hospital the first time Ravi sees Aarya.
Both of them Sadak and Sadak 2 they make mental health problems seem so extreme. While dealing with the pain and guilt over the death of a sister in Sadak apparently it is treated with a shock treatment in the movie, Sadak 2 tells you that when you are grieving for a loved one if you are having suicidal thoughts or attempting to commit suicide, then the only way to ‘get better’ is to commit yourself to a mental institution.
Not only does this type of narrative further stigmatize mental health issues, it is especially problematic in today’s setting, with a shattered public discourse on mental health already underway after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput, in the that, a member of the Bhatt clan, also known as Mukesh Bhatt, has already made a considerable contribution by comparing Rajput’s mental health with that of actress Parveen Babi, who suffered from schizophrenia. It’s amazing to see that even after 30 years, so little has changed in the way mental health is portrayed in a movie made by Mahesh Bhatt, and what has changed has actually gotten worse. What makes matters worse is that Bhatt is, in fact, counted as one of Bollywood’s thinkers, who in the past had also made films that received critical acclaim like Arth, Zakhm and Saaransh.
A storm of hate came Sadak 2 following his release due to the already ongoing controversy over Mahesh Bhatt’s alleged closeness to Rhea Chakravorty, who is currently under investigation by the CBI in connection with the death of Sushant Singh Rajput. But to assume that he has somehow contributed to the failure of this ridiculous film would be really presumptuous. It’s so terribly done, with some really bad performances from Alia Bhatt and Sanjay Dutt, that I doubt it would have survived even if it didn’t land in the middle of a controversy.
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