Ok, I don't know if this counts as a Hot Take but...
I did not care for Sukhee (2023)
*Spoiler warning if you haven't seen it and want to*
Ok, before you hit me with the pitchforks and torches, hear me out. I'm all for female empowerment and I'll admit, the main protagonist's life sucked. She was a housewife with barely any time for herself anymore, her husband and daughter took her for granted, and she had to constantly appeal to a society that (as much as I love my fellow Indian peeps) were straight up insufferable. To make things worse, the only person understanding her situation died and she had to pick between a frick ton of backlash and her highschool reunion aka the one shot she had at reconnecting with her past.
But I still had some big problems with the plot:
It straight up ignored the fact that the husband was as much if not more overworked than she was and high-key blamed him for her situation. This man was working himself until he crashed on the bed KO'd not long after dinner. Man was stressed but the movie kept telling him to understand HER situation but not the other way around.
Their daughter wasn't treated much better. Girl had schoolwork, monitoring other students, and a bunch of extracurriculars over her head and the lesson she had to learn was STILL doing stuff by herself. This girl was 15 and she was as stressed and overworked as her parents.
I will never get over how little accountability this movie made her take for her actions. Imagine you just find out your wife posted her cringey high school days on social media, embarrassing everybody, and the next thing you see is the wife of the man you've been trying to make a deal with pulling a wrestling move on him because your wife told him to.
Imagine you work yourself to the bone trying to get a better life for your family and without explaining why it's important, your wife suddenly tells you she wants to go to what you only know is a party while everyone is struggling. And after you tell her no, the first thing she does is go anyway, leaving you and your kid on your own to suffer with her absence. And the next thing you hear is she is going around with some other guy, man was living every man's worst nightmare!
Imagine your mom runs off who knows where, your dad tells you she's not coming back, and after a day of kids making fun of you for it, this random kid you scolded while being a hall monitor tells you you're lucky because you have a mom. I'm sorry, is the lesson here that deadbeat moms should be excused because orphans exist?!?
And the friends make it worse because while they keep supporting her, they keep taking the blame off of her instead of telling her what she did wrong while telling her how to turn her life around. Hum Saath Saath Hain tried to warn us about friends like these but we weren't finna listen. I will not be convinced these women were not trying to get this woman divorced because this whole time they were clearly shipping her with somebody else. And when the daughter tells what she only knows is a deadbeat parent "I hate you" and she cries, they tell her that she's just a kid, she doesn't know what she talking about. Ma'am, this is the same kid you said was old enough to do things herself, is emotional expression not one of them?!?
And Sukhee is never taught to actually express what she's thinking. She never tells her husband why this reunion was so important to her, (in fact she tells him she wants a break from her boring life as though that wording wouldn't have instantly made her cry if the roles were reversed), and their "fight" was her telling him things that could've been easily avoided if they oh I don't know, took time to talk about!
And that ending was what did it for me. Instead of Sukhee taking accountability for running off and leaving her family like that, she gets praised for it by everyone including her husband and daughter. Clear something up for me, is the lesson that whenever women can't express their struggles that the first thing they should do is run away and worry everyone so they'll give her what she wants??? Cause that's the message I got from this.
Can you imagine how much backlash this movie would've gotten if the dad dared to pull anything like this? Imagine if a man felt like he was in a rut, told his wife he wanted to go to a reunion, gets told things are too stressful here for him to run off to some party, goes anyway and leaves them to face society and possible bankruptcy because he wasn't working (or doing other things around the house that people take for granted because men do it), spent time with his friends and some random lady from his past, and comes back with his family clinging to him because they thought he left them forever. The movie would've become a flop the minute he left. The audience would've been screaming at the screen telling this woman to divorce this man and take the kid far away from him and that he deserves to have his life ruined.
Like I said, I've got no problem with female empowerment, but my problem is how this lady was allowed to get away with and put her family through so much with little to no accountability. There's good points about this movie like appreciating and respecting your wife and mother, but for me, the bad points outweigh them by a long shot. Shilpa Shetty is a good actress, but the movie didn't do it for me.
Vivek Oberoi talks about his regional projects; reveals he takes a pay cut to do films down south | Hindi Movie News - Times of India
Vivek Oberoi recently opened up about his desires to do a film in each southern language. He also spoke about his decision to take pay cuts for the same.In an interview with a news portal, Vivek said that he decided that he wanted to do a film in each Southern language. He knew that he cannot charge whatever he charges in Hindi and in other languages. He couldn’t even do it for free so he decided…