What is the basic requirement for a work of fiction? One would think, storyline. But perhaps, that is too much to ask for from a Bollywood film. Satram Ramani’s Double XL, recently released on Netflix, is riddled with issues. Surprisingly, the lack of a storyline isn’t at the top of that list. I am going to focus on one aspect, which is the anchor that tries to drive this film’s (lack of) story — body shaming.
Women are no strangers to body-shaming, and for the Indian woman, this reality is routine. Most of us do not have body types that fit into Western standards. We are subjected to constant scrutiny and unsolicited remarks about our bodies our entire lives. Double XL has two protagonists, Rajshri Trivedi (played by Huma Qureshi) and Saira Khanna (played by Sonakshi Sinha). While Trivedi, from Meerut, is struggling with her mother’s aspirations to get her married and her own goal of becoming a sports presenter, Khanna is an aspiring designer who has just found out that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Obviously, all of this is affected by the fact that both these women are overweight. Or are they?
The fundamental problem with Double XL is that its protagonists, in fact, aren’t. It is a case of bad sartorial choices with ill-fitting clothes, which even the character of Khanna (a designer), cannot save. For a social problem that haunts so many people, it feels like the entire problem in the film could have gone away if the protagonists had better clothes to wear. At one point, the padding added to the supposedly double XL actors, underneath their clothes, is visible. Are we still living in a time when we cannot find plus-size actors? In art, it is critical who represents what. When actors play characters they have no way of understanding, and do so without first doing their due diligence, the art created runs a dangerous risk of appropriation, violation even.
This is evident when the identity of the characters is reduced to their weight in the film. Khanna’s appearance is different from Trivedi’s. She has brightly-coloured hair streaks, tattoos, and a lip piercing. At one point, when Khanna laments to Trivedi about her life, she finds the need to explain those markers on her body by saying that it was so people would notice something else about her than her weight itself, when they first met her. It seems as though Khanna’s motivation behind any and every move in life is to conceal the fact that she is overweight.
In 2022, it should not be this hard to grasp the intelligence of your audience. It comes down to a sense of awareness, paying close attention to the conversations being had on social media and a close reading of the issues at hand surrounding the topic of discussion. The conversation Double XL tries to have was already had 10 years ago. This is not to say that it is not relevant, but to use the space of media and cinema, which is limited by time and privilege, to say something which has already been said seems like a colossal waste. Double XL could easily have been a film from the 2010s, a time around which the extraordinary Queen was released, or when we had conversations around Dum Laga Ke Haisha and its tight storytelling. In trying to give its characters agency, Double XL‘s writers take it away from its viewers.
anuradha.vellat@expressindia.com
