Sara Ali Khan, Dhanush and Akshay Kumar’s whacky love story ‘Atrangi Re’ is currently streaming on Disney + Hotstar.
The Aanand L Rai directorial has been receiving mixed reviews for the unusual romance and its treatment of mental health issues.
Atrangi Re Mental Illness Aspect:
For the unversed, Sara plays Rinku who’s witnessed a horrific incident as a kid. Her boyfriend Sajjad (Akshay) is actually a figment of her imagination, to help her cope with the unprocessed trauma from childhood. She shows symptoms of schizophrenia.
The love triangle is between Sara, the imaginary Akshay and Dhanush – to whom she’s forcefully wed but grows to adore. Now, some netizens criticised Atrangi Re saying that the makers have not depicted the mental health aspect sensitively and trivialized the issue by playing it up for laughs.
Netizens’ Tweets On Atrangi Re:
However, Atrangi Re writer Himanshu Sharma begs to differ. Defending the movie, Himanshu said that the film was intended to entertain the audience and wasn’t exactly a ‘documentary’ on mental illness.
“It (mental health) is not the only thing that we thought of. There are many other things like love – a debate between perfection and imperfection, the totality of love, what is love. The kind of conflict that happens with what we expect in our partners vis-a-vis what real people are. We expect them to be the finest of the people, with the topmost quality, but real people are flawed. So there were multiple things that the film was trying to say,” Himanshu told India Today.
He elaborated that mental illness wasn’t the sole focus of the film and in a bid to keep it entertaining, some things had to take a backseat.
“In the end, it’s a film and not a documentary. It is not a 500-word essay on mental illness, it is a film, it needs to entertain you. When we write a film, it has to manoeuvre its way to many of the issues that I spoke about, and at times certain things take a backseat, and other times it takes a forefront. Yes, the mental health issue is there but to me as a writer and for Aanand (L Rai) as a director, it was more of a sugar coating to say larger things. See the film for what it is and not for what you wanted. A large number of people saw that, they knew what the film was talking about and that is why we have got so much love,” he added.