Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023)

Gym-freak brat Rocky falls in love with Rani, who comes from Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani a well-educated Bengali family. Being from polar opposite worlds, the two decide to switch their families to adjust to each other’s cultures and backgrounds and to know if their marriage will survive. Rocky and Rani are trapped in a world where they are united by love but divided by families and the ultimate question is will they fit in?

The jaunty Rocky (Ranveer Singh) is a prosperous urban Punjabi youth or ‘pupy’ who enters the refined Rani Chatterjee’s (Alia Bhatt) life like a storm from another planet. A conscientious journalist, she comes from an ‘enlightened’ background where her father is a Kathak exponent (Tota Roy Chowdhury) and her mother (Churnee Ganguly) is an English professor. In contrast, Rocky runs a family sweetmeat business that is controlled by his grandmother Dhanlakshmi (Jaya Bachchan), who is patriarchal in her mindset and misogynistic in her behaviour. Over the years, Rocky’s father Tijori (Aamir Bashir) has treasured the jaundiced worldview of his mother, reducing his wife (Kshitee Jog) to a doormat and her daughter to only an object that needs to be married off. When Rocky and Rani realise there is more than just physical attraction between them, they try to convince their respective in-laws to get over the cultural differences by living with them for three months. There was a time in Hindi cinema when lovers hailing from two warring clans were told that when their uncles and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani aunts tried to break the rule, they met with a violent end. Here the troika of writers (Ishita Moitra, Shashank Khetan and Sumit Roy) have tweaked the trope by telling us that Rocky’s grandfather Kanwal (Dharmendra) and Rani’s grandmother Jamini (Shabana Azmi) could not turn their love into a relationship because of social conditioning and kept on squirming in loveless marriages. How the new-age couple draws from the past and helps their parents in getting over the cultural prejudices forms the rest of the story.