Ridiculously funny
Bala is hilarious, empathetic and problematic at the same time. Director Amar Kaushik understands the mechanics of comedy, something he proved in Stree, and here he takes things up a notch.
Ayushmann Khurrana plays an ordinary man with an extraordinary problem. He’s a former hot-shot — popular with the girls for his silken locks — and now, just in his 20s, he’s lost all his hair.
His childhood sweetheart has left him, no one wants to marry him. He’s demoted at his job (where he sells fairness creams called Pretty You), and is now being told he can’t possibly be in marketing, looking the way he does.
Bala refuses to give up. After trying some 212 hacks over two years — from standing upside down to rubbing on his scalp a mixture of buffalo dung and semen — he finally decides to wear a wig, and overnight, he’s a hotshot again.
He finds love with a model called Pari Mishra (Yami Gautam). And then a childhood friend (Bhumi Pednekar) turns up and lets the cat out of the bag, the day after his wedding.
The first half of the film is ridiculously funny. But while Niren Bhatt excels at the humour, he lets the whole endeavour down with crass, sexist and even racist tones to some of his jokes.
The second half is slower, but that’s partly because it becomes an interesting, nuanced look at male beauty and identity loss.
Khurrana never falters; Gautam shines in her role as a small-time model and ‘TikTok sensation’.
Pednekar plays a confident lawyer who has faced prejudice all her life because of her dark complexion. While she proves dependable, it’s unforgivable that the makers would rather use brownface than cast an actual woman with this complexion.
The supporting cast — Dheerendra Kumar Gautam as Bala’s brother, Saurabh Shukla as a devoted father, Seema Pahwa as a mustachioed neighbouhood mausi, Abhishek Bannerjee as a salon attendant and Javed Jaffery as Bala’s hirsute idol — is stellar.
Bala has some definite issues, but it’s a well-made film that will leave you in stitches more often that you’d expect.