A BUNTY AUR BABLI for the Millennials
The sixteen-year wait between Bunty Aur Babli and its sequel projects the face of a new, millennial Indian generation and their aspirations—even for the latest brand of the film’s con-artists.
It was 2005, the pre-OTT world, and just as multiplexes in India are starting to take over single-screen theatres in Indian metropolitans, the characters from the original Bunty Aur Babli rolled into our lives. Telling the story of two small-town (presumably) twenty-somethings, the film represented the hopes and dreams of a newly-liberalised India in a new millennium.
Unlike the generations before them in their family, Rakesh and Vimmi (played by Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukerji, respectively) had much bigger dreams. Their small-town realities stifled and bored them, as they strove to move to big cities to live larger-than-life lives. In the film’s opening credits, Amitabh Bachchan’s voiceover presented us to two India’s: one is a small-town world that was their reality; and the second, a shiny, glittery metropolitan world of their dreams.
The film first introduced the characters through the song “Dhadak Dhadak”, and the audience learned about their ‘khali-bore’ lives that the two protagonists wish to escape. The song repeatedly used celestial imagery to tell the audiences of how big their dreams are. Picturised in small-town environments where both the characters dance in and around trains and by-lanes, there was an emphasis on the contrast between their dreams and their reality. The song ended with a chorus of “Mujhe bulaye re” while the two look into the distance, foreshadowing to the audiences that they were about to chase the dreams calling out to them.
Set a decade and a half apart, the makers of the sequel consciously make an effort to show a shift in national and global dynamics between the two releases. While the pandemic doesn’t feature in the story, demonetisation, lack of jobs, environmental concerns, and millennial sentiments are prominently highlighted.
While Vimmi dreamt of becoming a Bollywood actress and winning the Miss India competition, Rakesh wished to disassociate himself from his father who works in the Railways. Both these dreams were representative of the moment. The mid-late 1990s saw Indian supermodels winning a number of international beauty pageants, leading to several successful careers in Bollywood. Therefore, Vimmi’s aspirations were very much a product of the time, where she felt that this line of work would pummel her into success in the film industry.
As for Rakesh: In an economically-liberalised India, and post- Y2K, he hoped for something more than the life of a government employee could offer him. While his parent’s generation looked upon government jobs as safety nets, he wanted to be his own boss, to sell his schemes to the world. He worried about dying in anonymity.
When the two characters meet and are scorned by the world, it isn’t entirely shocking that they choose a life of crime to achieve their dreams of wealth and fame. Putting Vimmi’s expertise in makeup and costumes and Rakesh’s ability to come up with new ideas to good use, they turn into a con power couple. While the theft powers their dreams of wealth, the ‘Bunty and Babli’ moniker that they operate under gives them the fame that they craved.
However, the protagonists eventually give up their conning ways towards the end of the film, for the sake of their newborn child. The film concludes with them joining forces with the police to fight crime. This, in fact happens to be the plot of the second installment of the film; although it doesn’t exactly pick up where the first film ended.
Cut to 2021, where in a corona-tinged world, theatres have started to reopen in limited capacities, and film-buffs were finally getting out of their homes. The world has drastically changed since 2005 in more ways than can be counted. Millennials who grew up on a steady-dose of Disney animated films and early 2000s Bollywood have now entered the workforce. And to entice these audiences back to their products, content pieces from that era are rebooting themselves in an effort to regain the attention of this generation.
Bunty Aur Babli 2 is easily a film that falls into this genre; and as someone of this millennial generation, I fall into the film’s targeted category of audience. I was in school when the first film was released, and although I was in love with its colourful sequences and songs, I’m not sure if I understood the film then the way I do now. So, when presented with an opportunity to potentially rekindle the emotions with the new film, Bunty Aur Babli 2 became the first film I watched in the theatre since the beginning of the pandemic. Armed with a large tub of warm popcorn and a glass of soft drink, I settled down to relive the nostalgia of the original.
What I discovered, however, was quite a different beast altogether.
While the first film spent a considerable amount of time acquainting us with the original Bunty and Babli characters, the audience in the sequel is told virtually nothing about the new pair. Whereas in the first we are shown a clear trajectory behind how Rakesh and Vimmi came to adopt their new identities, we know little about the characters in the second; their real names—Kunal and Soniya—are only told once to the audience.
Contrast this with the new film’s track “Luv Ju”, where the two characters clearly live in a more globalised world, where they spend their money on yachts and luxury cars in the by-lanes of Goa’s Fountains, just like any self-respecting millennial who has scrolled through enough Instagram-influencer profiles.
So, while one found themselves dreaming with Rakesh and Vimmi and rooting for their success in the first film, it was hard to symphatise with Kunal (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Soniya (Sharvari Wagh) in the second. Perhaps this was intentional, and the story in the sequel eventually takes us to Fursatgunj to catch us up with the lives of Rakesh and Vimmi, fifteen years since we last saw them. The story, perhaps deliberately, wants us to keep rooting for the original pair, with the new couple playing their antagonists.
The story picks up in 2021 where Rakesh (now played by Saif Ali Khan) and Vimmi (still Mukerji) have settled into their small-town lives, living the very lives that they had once run away from. Rakesh, just like his father before him, works in the Railways and Vimmi is a homemaker. The second installment of the film seems to forget all about how the two had joined forces with the police, and now squarely places them in a domestic setup. They have a child (who, going by the timeline of the original film, should’ve at least been in his late teens, but is somehow not more than ten or twelve) and spend their lives hoping for small smidgens of excitement. So naturally, when they’re told that someone is using their old alias to commit similar crimes, they jump at a chance to relive their glory days and save their ‘brand’ while they’re at it. What follows is a series of fairly-predictable attempts at catching the new con pair, culminating in an item number at the end of the film.
Although the plot of the second isn’t the most entertaining, what is interesting is the contrast between the time periods of the two films. Set a decade and a half apart, director Varun V. Sharma makes an effort to show a shift in national and global dynamics between the two releases. While the pandemic doesn’t feature in the story (presumably since the plot was written and the film announced before we went into global lockdown), demonetisation, lack of jobs, environmental concerns and millennial sentiments are prominently highlighted.
In the original film, Rakesh and Vimmi’s cons generally involved cash thefts and while they seemingly had no issue spending the stolen money; in a post-demonitised India, however, Kunal and Soniya face a crisis where they are unable to spend their stolen money due to increased scrutiny of large cash spends. This becomes the plot device for most of the film’s second half.
Unlike the original duo, who crave to leave their towns to move to Mumbai, Kunal and Soniya are already living in Gurgaon, a hub for urban millennials due to the presence of multinational companies and startups. We also learn that, like many millennials, they have studied engineering and Soniya’s main motivation for their thefts is to fund her startup. For the original Bunty Aur Babli, conning people was a self-serving endeavour, true to the neoliberal time that they were living in. But in a more socially-conscious millennial generation, Kunal and Soniya give away their loot to the less fortunate and in fact tie-in an exercise of cleaning up the Ganga as part of one of their cons.
It is in the last few minutes of the film that we learn that Kunal and Soniya have been pushed into a life of crime for lack of jobs in the current Indian economy. So, while their dreams may not have been as star-studded as their older counterparts, their search for stability is also a very millennial sentiment.
The reaction of each of the couple to suddenly coming into a lot of money also tells us volumes about the times that they were living through. In the original film, the song “Chup Chup Ke” picturises the two in dream sequences where they were clearly coming to terms with their new money. The characters live in a newly liberalised India where the internet was just beginning to creep into our lives. They holiday in the hills and drive a non-expensive looking car. Contrast this with the new film’s track “Luv Ju”, where the two characters clearly live in a more globalised world, where they spend their money on yachts and luxury cars in the by-lanes of Goa’s Fountains, just like any self-respecting millennial who has scrolled through enough Instagram influencer-profiles.
As someone who has watched the two films at their real time of release, living through the heady changes of the times that they represent, the contrast between our lives and times as a nation, as represented through the films is hard to miss. There is a stark dissimilarity between the younger Gen-Xers that the original Bunty Aur Babli represented, in comparison to the millennial pair who star in the new film. In a matter of two decades, the country has been through numerous changes, like the growth of internet providers, the availability of cheaper internet services, demonitisation, shifts in political powers and more. In the sequel, it is evident that the makers have made a conscious effort to represent the brave, new world that this new generation has come to inherit.
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Toonika Guha an audiobook producer, editor, and writer based in India. She writes about food, culture, gender and mental health. Her features have been published on platforms like Conde Nast India, Nat Geo Traveller India, Whetstone Journal, Firstpost, Quint, The Print and more. You can find more of work here. She is on Instagram: @toontooniwrites and Twitter: @ToonTooniG.
