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Hey, a movie about women like me starring ‘fat’ actresses who look glamorous as shizz? I was definitely going to volunteer to review this one. Twenty minutes into Satram Ramani’s 130-minute Double XL starring Huma Qureshi and Sonakshi Sinha, I am like ‘oh no, they didn’t!’ at almost every other scene.
Double XL is a film that follows two plus-size women who bump into each other while crying in the loo about being rejected for their weight, professionally and personally. Rajasri Trivedi (Huma Qureshi), who wants to be a sports presenter, is from Meerut, and Saira Khanna (Sonakshi Sinha), who wants to launch her own fashion label, is from Delhi. A great starting point, if only Double XL hadn’t lost itself in preachy sermons, complete cliches and terrible execution.
Saira needs a director to shoot an ad film for her launch in London and Rajasri needs to find a way to impress the owner of the sports channel who is in London for the India cricket series. So what is the logical option? Hey, why don’t we join hands with a director who has never shot fashion and knows nothing about it and also get on board a DoP who has been shooting wildlife all this while?
This leads the crew to London where Saira has the revelation that she wants to make clothes for all sizes. How is it that it never struck her ever before, especially given the kind of challenges she seems to be facing in finding clothes that fit?
Rajasri, on her part, aces a snatched interview with Kapil Dev (yes, he has a guest appearance). She manages to amuse the owner of the channel into accepting the pendrive with her interview, because you know it happens when you are drunk. [Note for self: Next time I am drunk I hope I am going to meet Tom Hardy and he’ll be amused enough to accept the script I wrote for him and then call me to say he will not just star in it but produce it as well.]
Both the girls end up making their dreams come true. Rajasri signs on to host a cricket show and Saira blows away the funders at a fashion show where women of all “attitudes” (huh?) walk the ramp, except there are no super skinny women (because they are never body shamed or never have trouble finding clothes their size?).
And that’s just one of the things that make the film feel extremely superficial. There are tons more. For a film that wants to challenge stereotypes, Double XL ends up reinforcing many. Not all fat women are fat just because they eat a lot. Not all fat women, in fact, binge-eat to assert themselves. And junk food doesn’t just make you fat, it can cause health complications too. No one is asking you to eat a salad okay? But if you are hungry, you can also stuff your face with healthy food that soothes the soul as much. Trust me, I know.
All the guys in the film seem surprisingly not overweight and wow, they have all accepted the women who are fat. Yay, fat women being appreciated by skinny men — it’s a win! Because there are no fat men in the film and even if there were, their appreciation is not worth it, so why show it.
Whether it is Zorawar Rahmania, the line producer in London, or Srikanth Sreevardhan, the DoP, they make the girls happy because even fat girls can have skinny boyfriends. It doesn’t matter if one is an oaf and the other a dopehead. They love fat women, so they must have a good heart! And fat girls can’t have standards. Rajasri’s father and Saira’s brother (also not obese men) are the indulgent men whose support is what gives the girls wings.
There are no women in supportive roles, apart from Rajasri’s Dadi, who I think is only supportive to piss off her daughter-in-law. Rajasri’s mother’s worry about not being able to marry off her overweight daughter is, okay, reasonable for a small-town mom. But are there no other women who could be supportive? Girlfriends? Random strangers? Mentors?
The only supportive female character is Saira’s skinny best friend who rolls her eyes while her friend gets angry because a dress doesn’t fit? And she does it with the sales guy who smirks as he tells her that this was their largest size?! That is supportive how? Trust me, I have heard enough ‘we don’t have your size’ and ‘that’s our largest size’ to know how it feels. My friend would have been silently communicating how to destroy the douche on the double.
Let’s not forget that the girls who are catty about Saira’s weight are thin. And all the skinny women appearing for the audition as sports presenters are all dumb bimbos who don’t know cricket? Or that a gym rat is always going to be a cheater because how can they truly be invested in a plus-size girl, right? Way to paint villains with the stereotypical brush as well!
Also what about sending out the message that losing weight is not about looking better but about being healthy? I would have loved to see someone condescendingly tell Rajasri and Saira that they might have high cholesterol or a fatty liver, and see one of them throw a blood test report at that person showing how their parameters were perhaps better than theirs. That would be more of a statement than stuffing their faces with unhealthy junk.
To be fair, Huma does a great job of portraying her character of a small-town girl with more problems than just her weight. Sonakshi doesn’t get the scope to do much and both are let down by bad writing.
For a film that wants to challenge the ‘one size fits all’ mentality, Double XL ends up painting all plus-size women with the same brush and putting them into one box. I wonder if any plus-size women were interviewed before writing the story or the script, because it stinks of ignorance of real-life experiences at multiple points. As a plus-size woman, I didn’t feel very represented at all.
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