Bhopal is really having a moment in Bollywood. It’s back again as the backdrop of a movie which is so busy earning its feminist cred that it forgets the show-more-than-tell dictum. And that’s the crucial element which renders Dr G serviceable, overall, rather than the cracker it should rightly have been.
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Dr Uday Gupta (Ayushmann Khurrana) wants desperately to specialise in orthopedics, but fetches up in the gynecology department at the town’s government medical college. And there’s where his true education – to lose his ‘male’ touch’ while learning to ‘listen’ to women — starts. The entire film, and its characters, are in service to the hero transforming from brash boy to sensitive man. His girlfriend, who shows up briefly to dump him, disappears entirely from view after her job is done. His new classmates, including the perky Fatima Siddiqui (Rakul Preet Singh) and a bunch of other confident women (he is the solo, extremely reluctant male in the class), rag him only so he can improve. His superior (Shefali Shah) lectures him non-stop with the same intention. His best friend, who floats through the movie with his skinny torso curiously unclad, sticks around long enough to teach him self-awareness. And his mother (Sheeba Chaddha), the only one who makes a stab at a life of her own, is lectured at.
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Sure, all those things are valid in this comedy of vaginal-vestigial manners, a debut feature from Anubhuti Kashyap, who happens to be Anurag’s sister. Because the focus of the film is the male hero, who starts off as an unthinking boor, and whose job is to unhook himself from a lifetime’s prejudices by the end, everything else necessarily revolves around him. And Kashyap does show the ability to create a lived-in universe. But after a point, the situations created as learning moments for Uday on his journey to being Dr G, the man comfortable being around female-dominated maternity-and-labour wards, become just one more thing. And I’m not sure just how tasteful it is to make a ‘stree-rog vibhaag’ the butt of a running joke; fortunately, by the time Dr G realises his true yin-yang potential, it settles down. The second half is an uneasy tonal switch, featuring the problems around an underage pregnancy, which feels like it was created to tell us just how far the hero has travelled from where he began.
Khurrana is also back to being the confused, yet good-hearted Indian male who learns to navigate noisome bodily fluids and reproductive systems in full flow with respect and sensitivity. As Dr Uday Gupta, he earns his spurs well enough. Shah, as the finger-wagging senior doctor, comes off familiar. Chaddha has a few nice moments, but I do wish Bollywood would give her a break from being mum to these coming-of-age young men. Both these ladies deserve more to themselves. It is Rakul Preet Singh who makes the most of a role which could have turned out to be cliched, but doesn’t because she makes so light of it. Learning to wear a stethoscope naturally, like an extension of themselves, is also a feature of all good doctors.
Doctor G movie cast: Ayushmann Khurrana, Rakul Preet Singh, Shefali Shah, Sheeba Chaddha, Indraneil Sengupta
Doctor G movie director: Anubhuti Kashyap
Doctor G movie rating: 2.5 stars
