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Pyaar ka Punchnama 2, one of the classic examples of how cinematic portrayal of gender roles and stereotypes can have an impact on the subconscious minds of the people regarding the same. You may wonder how? If one looks behind the veil of the surreal humor in the movie, they will discover there exists a lot of deep-rooted problems in certain dialogues and scenes.

The movie shows the lives of 3 best friends who fall ‘prey’ to 3 different girls, who ruin their lives. At the end of the movie, all the three boys leave the girls and realize that the only place they can find true love is from their mothers.

How about we give this movie a more suitable ending? It’s pretty obvious that after being in toxic relationships like that of the protagonists, they necessarily required therapy. After their break-up, the girls plan to talk it through with each other and Sunny, Chiku’s best friend. Sunny suggests that they should go for therapy since he knows how difficult it can be to cope with a break-up. Therapy might remind them that every cloud has a silver lining. Hence, they decide to give it a shot.

Chiku, who is depicted as a shopaholic and a desperate seeker of external validation for all her decisions, gets help from a therapist to liberate herself from her validation-seeking tendency and commit to whatever makes her happy. Supriya has been shown as a staid girl in the movie. Since her childhood, she always felt like she was trapped in a gilded cage, and hence she was afraid of taking any step that might disappoint her parents, especially her father. Her therapist guides her to take a step forward, and try and explore new things. With Kusum’s therapy, it is found that her nature of being money-minded is because of her history of parental issues and a troubled childhood, where she saw a strained relationship between her parents due to financial issues. The therapist guides her to heal from her past trauma and makes her practice certain coping strategies like meditation.

The boys, while in the bar, meet their old college friend, who happens to be a therapist, and explain to them the benefits of therapy. They agree to go ahead with it. The therapist makes them aware that, somewhere down the line, they didn’t act like a ‘lighthouse’ for each other. And it also leads to a cognizance about their difficulty in expressing their emotions, because they consider it as a ‘feminine’ quality. 

In conclusion, some of the anecdotes were funny but eventually, all of them made the same point as the prequel of this film: Men are treated like dogs by women. Pyaar ka Punchnama 2 completely destroyed the concept of romcom by portraying a story from the perspective of uninspiring heroes.

Written by: Ishita Varma

Featured Image: Jio Cinema