Yep. It was a movies weekend 🙂
In short: Climax is a disservice to the rest of the movie and to the complex issue it is about. But watch it for the rest of the movie!
Unlike rape and other obvious crimes, sexual harassment is not a black & white issue. If the questions of consensus etc. are complex in rape, one can not even start enumerating the grays with sexual harassment. Where does innocent, enjoyable flirting end, and harassment begins? What is cool to one, may be harassing to other. What is fine under one set of circumstances can be unacceptable under a different one. How do personal and professional relationships overlap and create difficult-to-classify situations?
The movie touches upon all of these. The difficult-to-establish-and-resolve character of the issue comes out very well. The only unsatisfying part was the climax. But talking about it would be giving away the “suspense” of the story. So, I will talk about it after a
Please do not read further, if you have not watched the movie and would not like to know the story beforehand.
With that out of the way, let’s come back to the climax. And what the hell!! Suddenly it was a very conventional Indian movie that has to have a clean resolution of things and a happily-ever-after-ending. And yeah – the protagonists have to be in love. And the lovers have to be united.
So, these two smart advertising bigwigs had brought the entire company on its knees because they were in love and couldn’t, for the love of God, communicate with each other!! The characters fooled everyone around them, and the story writer fooled us audience. And to top that wonderful realization of being in love, both of them have to leave the company and go off to Saharanpur to live happily ever after? The ambitious duo? The number 1 and number 2 in the company? WTF!!!!
Some issues are better left unresolved. I wish they had left this one too. This romantic resolution compromised not only the story, but also the discourse on complex and difficult issue of sexual harassment at work. Next time something like this comes up, I hope people don’t start looking the other way, assuming that it is lovers’ tiff spilling over to professional life.
Miles to go... 