Download Khandaani Shafakhana: Full Movie In 480p | 720p | 1080p

Download Khandaani Shafakhana: Full Movie In 480p | 720p | 1080p

Walk into Khandaani Shafakhana, if you please. It’s a sex clinic where everything from erectile dysfunction and low sperm count, to early ejaculation and injuries during passionate sexual encounters is cured with Unani medicines. Needless to say, the visitors to the clinic are discreet, and ‘Mamaji’ (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), the man at the helm of this clinic faces social boycott and protests. For many years, he single-handedly pursues his passion to cure people until he passes away, leaving the ownership of the clinic to his niece Baby Bedi (Sonakshi). She is a medical sales representative living with her mother (Nadira Babbar) and good-for-nothing younger brother Bhooshit (Varun Sharma) in a house that could be usurped by a family member, if she fails to repay her dues.
The film’s premise is interesting and relevant as it repeatedly underlines how sex is still a taboo in India. Thankfully, it does so without resorting to cheap humour and double meaning jokes. The setting of a small town in Punjab also works really well as the backdrop. A dusty old clinic, the busy bylanes of a grand bazaar, and the nondescript homes, add character to the narrative.
However, contrary to the promotions of the film, where it was reiterated that a serious subject is tackled with humour, the film is not all that funny. The humour is sparse and dialogues which could have been funny, lack the comic punch. With repetitive conflicts, the story takes an emotional turn and eventually, it gets stuck in a loop. The pace too, slackens.

The design of an old world ‘Unani’ medical clinic in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, and the ambience of a conservative and shy small town mind, embarrassed to talk about things like erectile dysfunction and a low sperm count, is rather well done. The sprawling clinic is in an old dilapidated building, and was once run by the late ‘Mamaji’, better known as the renowned Hakim Tarachand (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), the man famous for putting vigour into the sex lives of middle aged men in Hoshiarpur. He made his own concoctions from herbs, roots and the like, but functioned like a disciplined allopathic doctor, with elaborate case histories noted down in his voluminous notebooks, and sperm samples collected by the dozen.

Before he died, ‘Mamaji’ wrote a will, leaving his clinic, and the valuable real estate it occupies, to his favourite neice, Baby Bedi (Sonakshi Sinha), on the condition that she keeps it running for at least six months after his demise. Baby (Babita) is a medical representative and is more familiar with X-rays and lab reports, but she is nostalgic for her childhood, and has fond memories of her beloved ‘Mamaji’. So she takes on the challenge and responsibility.

As a woman, she is received with hostility by the shopkeepers of the commercial locality in which the clinic is situated. As it is, they feel that the proximity of the sex clinic harms their business. A lady hakim running it is taking things a little too far, they believe. Protests begin.

Meanwhile, as Baby potters around, and the reluctant male clients, initially hesitant to speak to a woman about their sexual infirmities, start coming back, she rather enjoys the experience.

There are downsides of this new line of work, of course. The funniest is when a patient puts down a little bottle of his coagulated sperm on the table and tells Baby what it is. In the next shot, she is in the kitchen at home, with her mother spreading ghee onto parathas. She watches her brother (Varun Sharma) wolf them down. The nauseated expression on Sonakshi Sinha’s face as she looks at him spreading some more ghee and eating, is priceless.

In the most powerful moments of the film, what we see is Sonakshi being talented and smart and powerful and being forced to listen to people who are stupider and less talented and just plan WRONG. Her mother is a stupid stupid woman. A nice woman, and we feel for her when she is humiliated in front of her in-laws, and we can see why Sonakshi loves her. But she is dumb. She took a loan from her brother and lost their house. She thinks to marry off Sonakshi without realizing Sonakshi is the only earner in the family. And we can see that Sonakshi has been bearing the weight of her stupidity for years. All the way back in childhood, she enjoyed working with her uncle and had a natural talent for medicine. But her mother declared it was a shameful thing to do and dragged her away. Her uncle left her the clinic because she was the only smart person in that whole household.

Honesty is a fine value, and this work has plenty of integrity to its purpose of asking for more sexual openness in our society. But the cinematic foundations for the structure of the film are flimsy, and this leads to an emphatically boring movie experience.