Koimoi Recommends Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu: When Shakun Batra Questioned Peer Pressure Through An Unconventional Love Story Starring Kareena Kapoor & Imran Khan
Today on Koimoi Recommends, I recommend you to watch Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, a film that is about two drunk people accidentally getting married on the poster of it but has way more depth than that
Koimoi Recommends Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (PC: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu Trailer Youtube)
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Koimoi Recommends Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu: Trust Shakun Batra to break stereotypes Bollywood has set for years and in the most unconventional way. We know Kapoor & Sons Since 1942 was all kinds of amazing and a cathartic biopsy of a dysfunctional family, but do you know, before that, Batra even analysed love like it was never done in the Hindi cinema? Today on Koimoi Recommends, I recommend you to watch Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, a film that is about two drunk people accidentally getting married on the poster of it but has way more depth than that.
Koimoi Recommends Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (PC: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu Trailer Youtube)
Rahul (Imran Khan) a man brought up to be a particular way, almost like a robot is challenged to be normal by a girl who has seen the other side of the world. Rihana (Kareena Kapoor Khan) is a girl who believes in living life to the fullest and tries to break Rahul’s monotony. When a drinking spree ends up in the two getting married in Vegas, that is where all the action begins.
Peer pressure is a thing in India, and as they say, you can take an Indian out of India, but not the other way round. At the heart of it, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu is definitely about an unconventional relationship that gives anchors to two lives. Still, deeper is about people bombarding others with their expectation, and just like a machine creating factory works, they know nothing better.
Shakun Batra, who is the director and has co-written the film with Ayesha DeVitre, is surprisingly a master at understanding and translating the Indian dynamics on the screen. In Kapoor & Sons, it was a family and their dysfunction relationships with each other that were explored. Batra hinted this way back in his 2012 directorial Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu. Apart from the relationship, which is far away from staple Bollywood, he also highlights how peer pressure does nothing but manufacturing robots. How dreams are killed, and a person ends up being a living example of monotony.
Koimoi Recommends Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (PC: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu Trailer Youtube)
Enters Rihana, everything that is against peer pressure. With both his characters, he creates opposites (not to call them right or wrong at any point). While Rihana makes Rahul realise his robotic existence, he tells her she needs a hook. These are two halves coming together in the most hopelessly romantic way but still way different from all that we have seen so far.
The best and my favourite part is Batra making being the average normal. And that is the ultimate messaging of the film for me. The film manages to teach us that it is alright finding happiness in being perfectly average, and perfection is a mirage all of us are trying hard to create.
Sadly, the film did not get the audience it deserves. But are in the digital age, and as Shakun Batra once said (to the effect of) “almost all the films that moved us are consumed on a laptop or a phone.” Let’s discover or rediscover Shakun Batra’s dissection of family and relationship on Netflix.
