Entertainment Review: Pooja Meri Jaan

A young woman rejects the very public proposal of a lovestruck friend. In private, she is rude and maybe borderline cruel. The man commits suicide and her life turns to hell.

Pooja Meri Jaan, directed by Navjot Gulati from a script by Kanishka Singh Deo, raises a very important issue– the way women are instantly judged and damned, if they break the mould of socially-approved behaviour.

Pooja (Mrunal Thakur) has had a string of relationships, and is drunkenly coping with the latest break-up when Aniket (Vikram Singh Chauhan) meets her.

They become friends, act on stage together– Romeo And Juliet– when the tragedy of Aniket’s death happens– but she does not reciprocate his ardent love.  On his insistence, she does give a relationship a try, but decides he is not the one.

Aniket refuses to take no for an answer and puts her in an awkward spot by proposing marriage on stage.

His suicide obviously angers his family and friends and an abetment to suicide case is filed against her. The female cop (Sunita Rajwar) calls out the overt misogyny of the prosecutor, Jatin (Vijay Raaz), but the genie of social media hate is out of the bottle.

Even as the case is on, there are calls for punishing “girls like Pooja.” She is labeled a slut and gold-digger. It doesn’t help that the lawyer she calls, Sana (Huma Qureshi), is a friend, but she practices corporate law;  in the first bail hearing, she is struck dumb. Jatin has a misguided righteousness on his side, and thinks nothing of pulling out Pooja’s exes and questioning her character.

Pooja is not the ‘good’ victim, she questions the double standards that are applied when it comes to women and relationships; she has to justify herself to her current boyfriend, but he is not required to give a record of his past to her.  Moreover, a man is not shamed for his love life, while a woman is answerable to everybody.

When Sana gets her act together, it is upto her to deliver the film’s message. In one instance, a man took his own life, but there are many more incidsnts of men using violence against the women who reject them.

In the film, Pooja has the support of her parents, there is no indication of the reaction of others close to her. The film ticks the right woke boxes, but in avoiding melodrama, it also ends up being a bit flat. Pooja’s perfectly manicured, red-painted nails are always visible, but not her mental state.  It would be traumatic for an upper class woman to be in jail, but the only interaction she has is with a mass murderer, who wants to be her friend.

The film may not be in the league of, say, Pink, but it should ignite some debate about the conditioning that allows society to condemn women so easily.