The New Packaging Of The Same Old Gaze 

Bollywood often congratulates itself for embracing modern storytelling. Characters now live together before marriage, women openly pursue desire, and relationships are presented as fluid rather than bound by convention. Yet beneath this updated vocabulary, many films continue to rely on surprisingly old ideas about gender. Homi Adajania’s Cocktail 2 is a useful example.

The film adopts the language of contemporary relationships, presenting a world in which marriage is not treated as inevitable and in which one of its female protagonists is unapologetic about her choices. At first glance, this appears progressive. But the film ultimately reveals how superficial such progress can be.

Shahid Kapoor’s Kunal is placed at the centre of the narrative and positioned as an essentially decent man caught between two women.

While the romantic conflict drives the story, Kunal remains largely insulated from moral scrutiny. Instead, much of the tension is generated by the actions of the women around him.

They are the ones who desire, compete, manipulate, and make mistakes. The man remains the emotional axis around which everyone else revolves. This imbalance reflects a larger trend in mainstream Hindi cinema. Films increasingly present sexually confident women as evidence of modernity, but often stop short of granting them genuine complexity.

Kriti Sanon’s Ally is introduced as independent and uninhibited. Yet the film shows limited interest in her inner life. Her desirability becomes her most defining characteristic. What is presented as empowerment gradually slips into objectification.

The problem is not that female characters express desire. The problem is that desire itself is frequently mistaken for depth. A woman can drink, party, reject marriage, or pursue romance on her own terms and still be framed primarily through male fantasy. Genuine progress requires narrative freedom as much as behavioural freedom.

What makes this tendency particularly effective is the way contemporary films package it. Emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and female vulnerability are often wrapped in glamorous settings, designer wardrobes, and picturesque locations.

The struggles of women become aesthetic commodities, consumed as part of an attractive lifestyle fantasy. Audiences are encouraged to see these films as bold and progressive, even when they remain rooted in familiar assumptions.

The endings are often the giveaway. After flirting with ambiguity, many such films retreat into reassuring moral resolutions.

Conflicts are neatly resolved, relationships are restored, and audiences leave with the comforting sense that everything has been set right. These conclusions function less as critiques of gender dynamics than as forms of absolution, allowing viewers to consume familiar stereotypes under the illusion of social progress.

To be fair, Bollywood has changed in important ways. But it is worth asking whether some of its most celebrated “modern” films are truly challenging old structures or simply updating their appearance.

Cocktail 2 suggests that, too often, contemporary storytelling means repackaging the same formula for a new generation.

Women are presented as liberated, yet still defined through spectacle, desire, and their relationship to a man. The result looks progressive, but the underlying gaze remains remarkably familiar.

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