A Runaway girl
4 min readJun 24, 2021

Analysis of the film-Coolie No. 1 (2020) in the context of the characteristics of mass culture.

SOURCE: Prime Video India

Roughly in this 2 hour 14-min film, five times, the word ‘Gareebi’ has been used to induce laughter. It is funny that this comedic device, in fact, only makes the audiences cringe even more.

Directed by David Dhawan, this film is the remake of his 1995 film of the same name which itself was a copy of the 1993 Tamil film, Chinna Maapillai. The 2020 version of the film stars Varun Dhawan in the lead role who plays the character of a porter named Raju, Sara Ali Khan as Sarah Rozario who is a young and rich woman, and Paresh Rawal who plays Sarah’s father whose only goal in life is to marry their daughters off to a rich man who owns tonnes of property. It also stars Javed Jaffrey as Jai Kishen, who pledges to make Jeffrey Rozario (Paresh Rawal) suffer after he rejects a boy proposed by him for his daughter. Jai Kishen plots a twisted plan to dupe the Rozario family, where he portrays a poor porter as a multi-millionaire heir and sets him off to marry the youngest Rozario daughter, Sarah. Heavy confusion, distasteful & demeaning dialogues, and ridiculous use of a twin story is what we see in the entire duration of the film.

David Dhawan brings no extra elements to the table despite being released in the 2020s. It only seems to reinforce stereotypes and indecent portrayal of female protagonists, transgenders (Varun Dhawan in one scene seems to make fun of them in a way that only looks ridiculous and bad), and economically weaker sections of society. The character of Raju, the porter, played by Varun Dhawan, who in actual life is a fair, good-looking ‘hero’ is given a dusky look. Why? Because he’s poor, he ought to be a dark-skinned human? It made me wonder how conveniently we link poverty with dark and dusky skins. Throughout the film, poverty is used to make people laugh. Dialogues like “tuche, gareeb, sadakchap bhikari ki kholi lagti hai (this looks like a poor, roadside ragpicker’s shack)”, “Iss gareeb ko kaam pe lagado (give this poor man a job)”, “Golf, raheso ka game (rich man’s game)”, and a few more to only make you wince with disgust. Poverty is a serious problem affecting millions of people in the world. Especially India, where innumerable lives are lost every year to suicide because of extreme poverty. It is disgusting to even think that why is this film ridiculing them as a matter of joke. Sure, you could say it’s a comedy, so there’s no harm. But where do we draw a line in comedy? Are we to forget how to treat other humans with moral respect and dignity?

Meanwhile, female characters hardly have any significant role in the film except for dancing to the songs, waiting on the balcony, and saying ‘yes’ to whatever comes their way. Sarah Rozario is a rich, modern, city girl who is gullible enough to fall in love with an imposter (Raj) and marry him. She dreams of living with him at his extravagant bungalow. To her surprise, instead, she has to compromise living in a small, shabby-looking place which, when both husband and wife arrive, only Sarah takes the charge to clean. She asks Raj to wait outside while she goes up, cleans the mess, and shines the place like a bungalow. Sara Ali Khan’s character throughout the film hardly shows any character arc, in fact, she hardly has a powerful role. The male characters determine her destiny in the film. Her father wanted to find a rich man and marry both Sarah and her elder sister to set their future safe. Later, when she marries Raj, she already feels like a secondary character against the male lead. In one scene when Sarah is harassed by some roadside goons, the ploy of ‘damsel in distress’ activates, and we all know what follows when a ‘heroine’ in any Bollywood film is eve-teased by hooligans. Even the lyrics of the songs didn’t spare the portrayal of women in the film. Words like ‘Choti Razai’ in the song Monalisa talk about the length of a woman’s clothes. Women are mere sexual objects in the film that are there to please the audiences and be eye candy.

It is a film where female characters are driven by what their male counterparts demand from them. Clearly, it’s a story by a man, of a man, and for a man. It’s irksome to see content like this pushed on the mainstream channels of entertainment like Amazon Prime Video. Simply because such content is deeply problematic and strengthens people’s beliefs further instead of showing them the true mirror to society. Coolie Nos.1 hardly seems to sell entertainment. In all earnest, the only things it sells are wrong beliefs and a disgusting attitude towards fellow humans.

#filmreview #coolienos1 #filmwriting.