‘Pooja Meri Jaan’: Juliet in the dock

What would the world make of Juliet had only Romeo died? The question looms over ‘Pooja Meri Jaan’ almost literally.

The film opens with a staging of Shakespeare’s famed tragedy, with Pooja (Mrunal Thakur) and Aniket (Vikram Singh Chauhan) playing the titular lovers. Having met through a theatre troupe, they have been friends for five years. Aniket has loved Pooja for about all five; Pooja, not so much.

Amid rousing applause, Aniket proposes marriage. She doesn’t quite say no, but there isn’t a smile of yes either. A shocked Pooja wears the ring, only for a fight to erupt backstage.

The fight escalates. Aniket dies by suicide. Because romance, Bollywood has taught us, is a strange country where persistence is adorable, obsession is flattering and a woman saying no is apparently a plot twist.

Her rejection becomes evidence. Her personality becomes evidence. Her purportedly long list of boyfriends becomes evidence. In a particularly grim social tradition, the dead man gets sympathy while the living woman gets an investigation. And this is where ‘Pooja Meri Jaan’ has a genuinely potent film hiding inside it.

The smartest thing about the screenplay is that it initially refuses to make Aniket an easy villain. He is not introduced twirling a moustache over a vat of toxic masculinity. He is filmy, persistent, apparently affectionate and completely convinced that love is something one eventually wins.

That makes the discomfort more interesting. The film is not asking whether a monster can hurt a woman. It is asking when the charming lover boy stops hearing her and starts rewriting her refusal as a temporary obstacle.

The answer, unfortunately, comes wrapped in a screenplay that sometimes explains its own homework. Everything from the camera treatment to the dialogue is middling and ineffective, leaving a pressing logline better suited to a crisper narrative.

And then comes the courtroom. Deplorable lawyer Jatin (Vijay Raaz) finds himself enamoured with the social-media trial reducing a woman to a hashtag and, after a sermon on how many men are ruined by “fake dowry cases”, approaches Aniket’s family.

Fighting for Pooja is Huma Qureshi’s Sana, a corporate lawyer and common friend to both, defending a woman she is not completely sure of.

The talented Qureshi is criminally underserved by the lacklustre script, though she brings welcome steel. Raaz does what Raaz does: perform menace, yet somehow ground it.

But the legal battle, laced with convenience, rarely develops the crackling tension its premise promises.

The irony is that ‘Pooja Meri Jaan’ is strongest when it trusts ambiguity. Thakur understands this. She does not play Pooja as some spotless patron saint who has wandered into a misogynistic courtroom by clerical error. Pooja can be impulsive, complicated, occasionally harsh and capable of questionable choices. Good. Let her be.

A woman should not need to be perfectly behaved before her no becomes legally, morally or humanly legible. Thakur gives that contradiction a bruised vulnerability, though flashes of daily-soap affectation creep into her performance. Chauhan has the more thankless task of playing a man who believes his own romantic mythology.

The film’s problem is not its heart. It is that its head keeps getting in the way.

There is a sharp film here about rejection, obsession, consent and the social reflex that turns a man’s emotional devastation into a woman’s moral indictment. ‘Pooja Meri Jaan’ occasionally gets very close to it. Then, just when it should dig deeper, it reaches for the shovel labelled ‘Message’.

Still, its central question survives the sermon: when a woman says no, why is the first instinct so often to investigate her reasons rather than respect her answer?