Jai Mummy Di

Saanjh Bhalla (Sonnalli Seygall) and Puneet Khanna (Sunny Singh) are next door neighbours and secret high-school sweethearts. But, their mothers – Pinky (Poonam Dhillon) and Laali (Supriya Pathak) – are constantly at loggerheads owing to an old unsettled score, which turns out to be the biggest hurdle in their relationship.

‘Jai Mummy Di’ is all things Delhi taken straight out of a comedy sketch – the ‘aunties’ are loud and full of themselves, husbands are henpecked, children are victims of tiger parenting, and clothes are shinier than the jewellery that they wear (which is a lot). And, amidst all that hurly-burly, a young couple dares to give their forbidden love affair a second chance. With the matriarchs of the family refusing to bury the hatchet, how do the heartsick lovers manage to end up together forms the crux of this romcom.

Before jumping to the flaws, one has to give credit to writer-director Navjot Gulati for ushering the audience into his world of ‘Jai Mummy Di’ with some clichéd yet laughable one-liners and hilarious supporting characters. But, soon after, it’s all downhill for this insipidly written and equally sluggishly directed comedy flick – the story derails way before the intermission and never gets back on track, there are way too many songs and dance numbers that it gets difficult to sit through beyond a point. Sonnalli Seygall, as this bold and bratty lass from Delhi, looks glamourous on screen but does not quite manage to get into the skin of her character; comes across as too plush for the colloquial Saanjh. As a love-struck momma’s boy, Sunny Singh has his moments but that, too, withers away with time (and pretty early on). The tiff between senior actresses – Supriya Pathak and Poonam Dhillon – is not one of their finest works. Pathak does pull off the quarrelsome nature of her character Laali with reasonable conviction, but Poonam Dhillon’s most certainly not the Pinky that the director was looking for.

Truth be told, ‘Jai Mummy Di’ only works to a certain degree because of the glam factor and some of its hummable musical content, rest is just bland and boring.