The Perfect Husband

‘Badi mummy’ is the stereotypical matriarch of an extended Punjabi Sikh family based in Chandigarh, a small town in north India, who will do anything to see her daughter (Rajeshwari Sachdev) and granddaughter (Neha Dubey) married off. Trouble is, they would both prefer ‘love-marriages’…
This ‘Hinglish’ movie is a failed, albeit honourable, attempt at a critique of the Indian obsession with marriage and the subservient role the modern woman still has to adopt to get a suitable boy. Shame, then, that it is so amateurish and conflicted: Paul cannot decide whether she wants to make a proper masala movie or a ‘Monsoon Wedding’.

The script is terrible: every single cliché is here from overbearing mamas, horrible husbands, gossiping servants, the hunk with a heart. Worst of all is the Mills & Boon dialogue: when the Stardust-reading granddaughter tells her fiancée ‘you taught me to fly and now you are telling me I cannot spread my wings’, it is hard to suppress a giggle, or to care.