Oftentimes these days we come across ill-fitting products in movie theatres which we feel should go straight to OTT.
Not Ram Narayan’s Telugu unfunny comedy Laila. This one should have gone straight to the trashcan. It is a disgrace for all involved, primarily the leading man Vishwak Sen who was presumably trying to have fun with a gender-bender.
At the brainstorming sessions, Sen must have told the writer Vasudeva Murthy, “Get me something in blue and pink, vanilla and strawberry… nahin samjhe? Arrey, Boss, make me a man in a profession involving women and then dress me up in drag to take on the villains. That will bring the house down.”
Tragically this supposedly funny gender-bender (ha ha) is as amusing as molar surgery. Perhaps worse, for this operation is carried out without the painkiller. It moves, no, crawls from one improper “joke” to another, until we are left wondering if the joke is actually on us: make it so consistently improper that it begins to seem like a parody on political incorrectness.
Vishwak Sen in a role he will take many years to get over, plays the owner of a beauty parlour where women of all kinds come for their facials, etc. The first-half tries to convince us about how comfortable women are around Sonu, although like many beauticians, he is not gay.
The script, which ‘flattens’ to deceive, goes to great lengths to show what a ladies’ man Sonu is. The parlour almost acquires the hue of a women’s ashram where the godman applies beauty creams instead of gyaan. The women giggle and moan as if they were in Asaram’s ashram.
In the second half Vishwak Sen dresses up as a woman named Laila and opens a parallel beauty parlour urging his clients to give it a try.
“You look like actor Vishwak Sen,” a woman tells Laila. This could be the funniest line in a film which thinks sexist jokes are fun and humiliating women for their skin tone is the done thing. The film’s villain Rustan(a grotesque Abhimanyu Singh) rejects his new bride when her “fair” makeup, done by Sonu, comes off after the suhaag raat.
Rustam now wants revenge. So do we. For the crimes of hideousness that this tour de ‘farce’ is guilty of. I have seen many morally perverse oddballs. But none so proudly dim-witted.
Is Laila the worst Indian film of 2025? Hard to say. We have a long way to go. Laila insults everyone and everything from actor Chiranjeevi(the mere mention of his name in a film like this is insult enough) and human intelligence. If you are planning to watch a fun film on a hero in drag, skip this one. Try Rishi Kapoor in Rafoo Chakkar or Aamir Khan in Baazi.
