Man Up, Woman Down?
There are only two instances in TBMAUJ when Sifra seems to act on the basis of her own reasoning, rather than an existing instruction. The first is an unprovoked act of violence: She viciously shoves Dharmendra for no reason when setting fire to the farmhouse. The second is when she strikes Aryan. Both men are shown as heroes who love her and stand as obstacles in Sifra’s path only because she’s gone astray. However, nothing in previous scenes suggested Sifra could be violent as she is with the patriarch and his successor.
While the original Sifra could be persuaded with words to understand where she’s gone wrong, the malfunctioning Sifra does not see reason. Instead she gravitates towards violence, but in a departure from the otherwise simplistic writing of TBMAUJ, the bad robot hints at more complexity than Sifra did with her original programming. Even in their final confrontation, the men aren’t enemies as much as obstacles in Sifra’s path. It’s worth noting that even though she’s much stronger than Aryan, Sifra doesn’t lash out at him with all her power. She hits him with the intention of putting him out of her way, rather than killing or disabling him (this is despite Aryan having taught Sifra ‘tricks’ like dangling a man from a rooftop or crushing someone’s hand during a handshake).
Sifra’s resistance to Aryan is to simply refuse to bend or crumble. When he hits her, her body seems to collapse, but then she pulls herself straight again and locks her unwavering gaze upon him and us, thanks to a direct look into the camera. TBMAUJ focuses its own narrative gaze on a teary-eyed, sword-uselessly-in-his-fist Shahid Kapoor as Aryan mans up and bludgeons his wife to-be — so much for his promise that he’ll be Sifra’s “best admin ever” — for the greater good of his family and presumably, Delhi.
The Conundrum of Femininity
Directors Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah, who have also written the film, hint that Sifra has developed both a personality and an ego when at the end of TBMAUJ, Sifra 2.0 seems to identify Janhvi Kapoor as a competitor. Neither the idea of a sequel nor the prospect of a love triangle sound particularly exciting, but for the detail that if Janhvi Kapoor is pitted against Kriti Sanon, then the follow-up to TBMAUJ has the potential of exploring different models of contemporary femininity and modern gender dynamics.
Considering how deliberately TBMAUJ turns away from any kind of complexity, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect depth in its sequel. Maybe the delicious possibilities of the bad robot scenes are a blip in the film’s programming. However, if Indian storytellers are so inclined, there’s a lot to potentially explore with what has been set up with TBMAUJ. Research has shown that there is a proliferation of feminine robots — a literal objectification of women — because women are generally perceived as more humane compared to men. As Kate Manne wrote in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, “Often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.”
But what are the attributes that make up a woman’s humanity, as opposed to that of a man? Does it necessarily have to be framed as an opposition? What does it mean to be womanly and are there new models of idealised women that can revamp the tired tropes of the goodie-two-shoes and the bold, ‘bad’ girl? How is the traditional male hero informed by modern women? Does society need feminine robots to infuse the idea of masculinity with humaneness?
Is the power cut that happened earlier responsible for me overthinking a film that is, at its best, underwritten?