Khandaani Shafakhana movie review: Bold, but with not enough laughs

Cast: Sonakshi Sinha, Varun Sharma, Annu Kapoor, Badshah Director: Shilpi Dasgupta The word sex remains such a taboo subject that no matter what, or how open minded the young are, a large percentage of us would rather brush it under the carpet. After the critical and box office successes of both Vicky Donor and Shubh Mangal, comes debutante director Shilpi Dasgupta’s Khaandani Shafakhana, a no-holds-barred but neither-preachy-nor-serious take on sex clinics in India. Though revolving around the small town of Hoshiarpur in Punjab, the film is an attempt to jostle with the new generations who don't shy away from uttering some of the unmentionable or socially proscribed words with so much ease that their parents turn all shades of red and crimson, and eventually blue in the face trying to suppress anger over their expressive speech. All hell breaks loose when Punjabi kudi Babita Baby Bedi is gifted a sex clinic by her favorite mama who specifically mentions gifting his fertility clinic in his will but only upon fulfilling a precondition: she has to run it successfully for six months before she can reap rich dividends and sell it for monetary gains. When some of the patients who visit such clinics share their trauma of losing their libido or not being able to rise to the occasion or doctors at one of India’s best known Unani institutes, suspend the services of one of their staff Mamji for being too explicit in his classroom while imparting sex education, you feel enraged for identifying with the moral tone that we often see and hear being mouthed by many hypocritical lot of men and women.