Brij Mohan Amar Rahe movie review: A misstep from Netflix after Love Per Square Foot, Lust Stories

According to a universally accepted showbiz adage – dying is easier than making a comedy. Netflix India’s latest Original film – Brij Mohan Amar Rahe, a dark comedy about a con gone wrong, delivers multiple deaths but not a single joke lands. Brij Mohan, played by Arjun Mathur, is a lingerie wallah who believes “poori life bas do cheezon par tiki hai – luck aur f**k” (life is great if you have two things – luck and f**k). Sweety (Nidhi Singh), his very shrill and nagging wife, is obsessed with perfumes (Old Spice is her favourite) and getting a dimple like Preity Zinta. And, there is his girlfriend Simi (Sheetal Thakur), who loves shopping and sex. When a get-rich-quick scheme goes wrong, Brij fakes his own dead and runs away with Simi. [caption id=“attachment_4937301” align=“alignnone” width=“1200”]  A still from the Brij Mohan Amar Rahe trailer.[/caption] The film is teeming with ‘quirky characters’ – there’s a corrupt and incompetent cop, a disabled grandfather, a judge who wants to pass a landmark judgment and a small-time moneylender gangster. The film is set in middle class Delhi, where women are sexually bold and the abuses flow freely. On paper, director Nikhil Bhat has all the ingredients for making a memorable ‘desi cool’ film. Only, at 1 hour and 40 minutes, the film is a drag. In the first five minutes of the film, we see Brij peeing on the side of the road; he says f**k about eight times; has sex in his lingerie shop and gives us the stats on the percentage of Indian women who have sex fully naked (30 percent, if you are interested). This is clearly a paint-by-numbers job with Bhat using every cliché of the sub genre. Brij addresses everyone as paaji and explains the different connotations of saying ‘bh*****d; the women are empty-headed sexpots; and, random old Hindi songs play in the background (possibly because the producers SaReGaMa have a rich catalogue). What starts off as a zippy caper morphs into a satire of the justice system and ends up being a frustrating farce. The biggest problem, though, with Brij Mohan Amar Rahe is not that its clichéd, that it addresses too many themes or even that sub-plots are left hanging. It just doesn’t engage. You don’t care if Brij and Simi will get their happily ever after or if Inspector Beniwal will get his transfer. Sharper dialogues and probably a more capable cast could have had a little more success in selling the clichés. Bhat squandered a good idea of mistaken identities on a forgettable trifle of a film. After an eminently enjoyable Love Per Square Foot and much appreciated _Lust Stories_, Brij Mohan Amar Rahe is a misstep from Netflix.