Let it not be said that Shahid Kapoor is unmindful of the scathing criticism levelled at his new film Kabir Singh, charges that the film has survived to scale new box office heights. Despite being panned by critics as normalising misogyny and glorifying toxic masculinity, Kabir Singh has scored a double century in ticket sales in 13 days, one less than Salman Khan's Bharat which fetched the sum in two weeks. In a post he shared on Instagram, Shahid Kapoor writes: "Thank you for understanding him, forgiving him, loving him with all your heart. We all fall apart. And we all must strive to rise from our faults... He is flawed, so are we all... The most flawed character I have ever played has become my most loved."
"Here's to cinema mirroring life. To protagonists who don't have to be restricted by their goodness and can be human and imperfect. There is perfection in imperfection and that is the beauty and the challenge of this human life," Shahid wrote. Read his post here:
Kabir Singh, a remake of the equally successful Telugu film Arjun Reddy, has been savaged for its portrayal of its male lead as a violent and self-destructive man and of its female lead - played by Kiara Advani - as submissive and without agency. A film like Kabir Singh has no place in 2019, critics say. "Emancipation for the heroine here means her jumping into bed with the hero at every available opportunity and then preening over the number of times that the two have had pre-marital sex. This approach to gender assertion comes from a caveman philosophy that one thought India's filmmakers have put behind them for good. But no, Kabir Singh and its makers are too firmly stuck in the past to notice that the world has moved on," wrote NDTV film critic Saibal Chatterjee in his review of the film. 'Beyond redemption' was his verdict.
At the box office, though, the veneer of wokeness has been stripped away. Kabir Singh, made by Arjun Reddy director Sandeep Vanga Reddy, is a blockbuster and will live on forever as such.
