Watched it last night.

I would recommend everyone to watch it. Everyone should know that Student of the Year 2, wasn’t the worst film of the year. In fact, I wouldn’t even consider this a film rather just a mindless demonstration of what happens when a director is too blind to understand the difference between glorifying a sadistic sociopath under the garb of masculinity and vilifying or criticizing the same by showing a negative outcome.

What annoys me about this movie apart from its cheap practice of shifting play speed at random appearance of the protagonist is how it portrays men and women. The film starts with a mentally unstable Kabir (spoiler alert he stays mentally unstable throughout the film, and even when he is with Preeti, the female protagonist) going about his daily antics of finding females to procreate with. Every scene is carefully crafted to make Kabir look as masculine as possible. His beard is perfect even thought he doesn’t trim has an absolutely fit body even though he is supposedly suffering from severe depression. He is constantly on drugs and is an alcoholic gone beyond repair and yet somehow has enough sense to conduct major surgeries on patients. He is the so called ‘alpha’ and therefore these are some of the traits they should possess when being depressed and mentally unstable? Right? I mean alphas aren’t mentally unstable but if they ever were this is how they should be of course. And the women in the film? Well they are nothing less than props in magnify Kabir’s sociopathic behaviour. In fact they are portrayed in such a worthless manner, I don’t even have enough material to critically analyze any one particular woman (not even the main female protagonist, I’ll be discussing about her later).

It’s disturbing that this movie not only finds this type of behavior socially acceptable, but also glorifies it. For example when Kabir gets angry in any scene, it is supported by loud motivational build up (mostly cringe) music you often hear at the entry of a cheap ‘hero’. When Kabir does something morally incorrect, or socially or lawfully unacceptable, the film often takes Kabir’s side. Rather than highlighting the outcomes in a practical manner, Kabir seems to always get what he wants one way or the other.

Now let’s talk about the female protagonist and the other female characters. The only problem I have with her is that she just doesn’t speak up. Like her first dialogue, the first time she says anything was ask Kabir “what do you like in me?” Seriously?! This guy practically behaves as if he owns her. Goes around the college proclaiming that she belongs to him and no one should touch her. If this looks like normal behavior to you, just because Preeti ended up falling in love with this maniac (God knows why), you also need to consider how ugly this would have looked if Preeti hadn’t fallen in love. The first time Kabir talks with her properly, he basically kisses her in the cheeks. This was a 2 mins interaction by the way. A relative stranger kissing you when you aren’t even attracted to them, how does that feel? Creepy? Irritating? Humiliating? The problem just gets worse and worse as Preeti basically tolerates Kabir’s antics in the name of love. But God, she just doesn’t know how to speak. She doesn’t oppose him, doesn’t say anything to tell him where he is wrong, she simply agrees with him, supporting and motivating all of his sociopathic behavior. As I said the movie shamelessly glorifies all of this and then aims to be realistic. The second important female character is the ‘actress’ who falls in love with Kabir (yeah, you heard that right an actress falls in love with our clown). She cares for him, tries to help him keep his life in check, irons his dresses and goes out with him. And what does this mistake of a character does? He straight up asks her for sex on the first meet and then boasts about it to his friends, how she will accept his offer soon because of course he is irresistible. Oh and then he goes on to degrade his friend’s profession in front of him, that friend who was going to sacrifice his sister to this demon, because he couldn’t see him depressed, and stayed by his side right from the first few scenes. He of course, goes on to scream on the actress too when she declares her love for him and leaves her in the middle of nowhere, devastated. In his words he wanted sex from her and nothing else. This actress obviously has a better personality than Preeti, but at the same time I don’t understand the use of putting this extra character in the movie when all she was there for was to get screamed at. But hey, that’s Kabir Singh, he is so angry he might as well turn into hulk. The other female characters are all portrayed in the same way, no shades, no personality, just some puppet in eternal fear of Kabir’s rage and just there as a punching bag for an angry Kabir.

This guy is careless too by the way. Instead of calmly talking with Preeti’s father, maybe taking his family to her house to talk out the problems, he basically goes on in full on rage mode and just disrespects her entire family in front of her and then slaps her because she couldn’t convince them. Then he goes on to take drugs and for the first time we see peace, this idiot is laying on his bed for 2 days senseless. Preeti on the other hand gets married, but don’t blame her she does come to sort things out at night with her father, before her marriage. Kabir was of course is senseless pissing his pants (yes he does that). The choice of background music is just so bad in almost all the cases its laughable. And this only makes the pissing scene looks like a joke (come to think of it this entire movie is nothing less that a joke).

The realism this movie lives in is dangerously close to the world we live in. Yes those behaviors are unacceptable, but the story can actually happen. You can fall in love and get rejected, and end up devastated. You can study and get a good rank in the medical entrance and then go on to be the college topper. And you can have anger issues too. And this is where the scary thing is, should we look up to Kabir’s case and enjoy his antics like the movie portrays it? Or should we constantly highlight his mistakes and vilify him where the movie fails massively? There are many good movies, that pushes the notion of devastation in love without injecting unnecessary glorification of the flaws in the characters. In fact, even though I didn’t like Devdas, I still feel that movie has a way better portrayal of a flawed character. It does glorify some of his flaws but in the long run we get to see the demise of Devdas which was inevitable. Also the other characters do no support Dev in his antics which is quite a big difference. An excellent movie which comes to mind, dealing with depression and bullying, where we get to see a flawed character developing is Koe no Katachi (A Silent Voice). It’s a masterpiece which actually places us in the shoes of a depressed bully. It’s haunting and unapologetic in its approach. The bully does not get entertained. He ends up hurt, disturbed, and suicidal. But none of this is glorified. His bully is not show in positive light, there is nothing macho about it, no portrayal of him doing the socially wrong thing in a good light. We don’t sympathize with him immediately, but we see him change, and it’s then that the thought sets in, that maybe now he should be forgiven. This by the way doesn’t happen with Kabir, he stays the same throughout. Now don’t get me wrong, the movie does tries to kind of show that Kabir has realized his mistakes, which were drug abuse and staying away from family, but not his anger and borderline sociopathic behavior. And of course the movie won’t be doing that, as I said, it is glorifying these flaws in him in the positive light. Being a borderline sociopath is not wrong according to the movie.