Fixing the Family Album

My Mirror column yesterday: 

Like a memorable family gathering, Kapoor and Sons serves up a mix of merriment and tears.

At the core of Shakun Batra's new film is an abiding affection for family gatherings. You know, the good ones—the ones in which secret crushes are confessed to cousins, vast quantities of food consumed, endless rounds of Antakshari played, and the cockles of every heart so warmed by the general bonhomie that long-held grudges can be—at least momentarily —forgotten. 

But of course, as we all know, family gatherings can often be the opposite of heartwarming. Herding the parivaar together into a concentrated space—and loudly insisting that they get along—can have the distressing effect of rekindling not good feelings, but bad ones. We've all been there, watching with bated breath as buried resentments bubble their way up to the surface and threaten to burst into flames; knowing full well that once someone lights the match, there's going to be no dousing the fire. 

What makes Kapoor and Sons rare, at least in the Hindi movie universe, is that its joyful arrival at the feast of the Great Indian Family does not preclude a full-blooded dissection of whatever is then served up at table. And despite the fact that this film comes to us from the Karan Johar kitchen, what's served up isn't always pretty. 

Sure, by having his stormy unravellings take place against the perfect mists of Coonoor, where his characters get to fight it out in the sort of gracious, tasteful old wooden bungalow you've always dreamt of, Batra makes sure there's no dearth of pretty things to look at. And he gives us three young leads who're delightfully easy on the eye: Fawad Khan as the sober, successful elder brother, Sidharth Malhotra as the younger one still struggling to find his feet, and Alia Bhatt as the poor little rich girl: an orphaned princess with a big old house and no family to put in it. 

But to the credit of both director Batra and cinematographer Jeffery F. Bierman, the film doesn't dwell on the good-looking-ness of anyone or anything. Instead, it looks at Coonoor with the same wryly affectionate eye as it does the family's foibles, and presents it with the same light touch. Batra might display a glimmer of nostalgia for what's unchanged about the hill station—the oldschool photo studio, for instance—but it sits happily alongside an enthusiastic embrace of the new - like a corny Mr. Ooty contest, deathly serious to its muscular participants but faintly ridiculous to everyone else. 

That ability to keep the goofy side of things going, to try and prevent the terribly serious stuff from overwhelming everyone and everything, is one of the film's strengths. And suitably, that sensibility is embodied in the film's likely most memorable character: the raunchy nonagenarian grandfather who refuses to let a mere heart attack and hospitalisation keep him from ceaseless potty humour or sneaky porn-watching sessions on the miraculous new instrument he calls the Papad. Played with an infectious air of mischief under layers of prosthetic make-up by the marvellous Rishi Kapoor, Dadu is a character far less hammy and far more believable than Amitabh Bachchan's similar recent turn as Bhaskor Banerjee in Piku(2015). 

But while punctuating the film with reasons to giggle, Batra and Ayesha Devitre's script doesn't shy away from the grown-up stuff. On the one hand is bada bhai (Fawad Khan, named Rahul Kapoor, which is also what Batra named his hero Imran Khan in his first feature Ekk Main Aur Ekk Tu), having to stand tall while secretly collapsing under the weight of being his mother's "perfect bachcha". On the other, there's the chhota bhai Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), who feels like he's been running all his life: running from the family's expectations, running to catch up with his elder brother—but always remaining stuck, as he puts it, as "runner-up". 

Perhaps even more powerful than the brothers' own festering misunderstandings are the ones created by their parents. Batra offers a cruelly unforgiving view of parents as those people we rely on to be measured and judicious and 'adult' - and whose deeply-held prejudices can therefore, in their unthinking moments, really prove to be the undoing of families. Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah are very good indeed as the harried older couple caught in an entrenched pattern of marital mistrust, their taunts and counter-taunts bouncing off each other like a volley in some horrible tennis match. But unlike the fairy-tale version of the unhappy older couple in Shandaar and Khubsoorat, or the practically irredeemable relationship between Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah that was the most powerful thing in Dil Dhadakne Do, these are characters whose frailties make them seem flawed and vulnerable, but not unloveable. And so one feels all the more deeply for them, for the things they are forced to leave unsaid. 

Kapoor and Sons, like Rishi Kapoor's old Dadu, is fixated on the happy family photo - as if capturing his warring clan in the same frame will magically erase the real distances between them. One of the film's most hopeful moments comes out of the collective viewing of old pictures: visual proof that they once were happy. At one pre-climactic moment, Ratna Pathak Shah's character, wounded by a recent revelation about her husband, stalks off in disgust before the camera can memorialise the assembled company. A 'Happy Family' image now would be fake, she says, and she has a point. But the relationship between life and our memorialising of it may be closer to what Dadu believes: make the picture, and you make the memory. Sometimes what it takes to be happier is to make-believe that we can.

Published in Mirror.

The Heart of the Matter

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Rich people do think about money, suggests Dil Dhadakne Do. And sometimes, it seems, they even have feelings.

Through the looking glass: Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah in a scene from Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do (2015)

For that category of Zoya Akhtar fans who have been waiting for a return to the understated charisma of Luck By Chance, the arrival of Dil Dhadakne Do tells us what we've been refusing to believe: Woh director na milegi dobara. DDD, which plays out almost entirely on an ocean cruise, has much more in common with Akhtar's second offering, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Other than replacing sun-kissed Spain with Turkey, Akhtar has substituted ZNMD's male friendship with a focus on family bonding. 

The family, needless to say, is fantastically rich. The Mehras -- salt-
and-pepper-haired Kamal (Anil Kapoor) and trying-to-lose-weight Neelam (Shefali Shah), both rather fine -- are celebrating thirty years of marriage by inviting close friends and family on an all-expenses-paid luxury cruise. The fact that it's a marriage both parties have pretty much checked out of doesn't seem to matter much to anyone, least of all the gossipy ladies who seem to hang out with Neelam only so they can make catty remarks behind her back. Even the Mehra progeny -- Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra, both effective in their respective roles as hangdog and tightly-coiled siblings -- seem not to particularly care that the anniversary is just an excuse for their parents to conduct a lavish display of wealth. 

There's nothing wrong with the premise. In fact, Akhtar makes things interesting by telling us that Kamal Mehra's plastic-container-manufacturing firm is making losses. It makes the expensiveness of the cruise a kind of Jalsaghar-style last dance, before the Mehras are forced to publicly acknowledge impending bankruptcy. It also increases the level of fakeness with which we're now dealing. Plus I enjoyed the idea that someone who thinks nothing of inviting three dozen people on a two-week-cruise can simultaneously keep zealous tabs on how much champagne is being drunk.

One of the unexpected things about DDD as a rich-people film is that the rich people in it aren't oblivious to questions of money. Kamal Mehra's self-made businessman (nouveau riche if you're being snooty) is full of resentment at the people living off the wealth he thinks has been produced by his talent and hard work, and the scenes in which this comes to the surface -- with his wife and son respectively -- are some of the film's most brutally honest. I wasn't quite as convinced by the idea of Ayesha's being self-made because she sold her jewellery to start a business: there's a bizarre obliviousness here about khandaani capital as what helps create capitalists. 

But the film's take on these business families is so ridiculously monochromatic that one has the sneaking suspicion that this is the Bombay person's unreconstructed view of the Delhi rich.Whereas in both of Akhtar's previous films, one felt she wasn't harsh enough with her characters, here it seems that she doesn't like them at all. The men's golf-playing camaraderie involves snarkily pulling each other down on business deals, while the lunching wives do the same on personal matters. Ranveer and Priyanka's likeable characters are saddled with familial expectations whose unreasonable burdens Akhtar is clearly sympathetic to, being the inheritor of a weighty family legacy herself. But Akhtar's account of the Delhi elite stops at the lowest level of caricature: uncles who mispronounce English words, and aunties who have nothing better to do than matchmake their daughters, or those of others. And oh God, is it possible that a business scion distressed about selling his private plane would have a mother trying to comfort him with a Nirula's Hot Chocolate Fudge? The whole of the parental generation is shown as so dull, manipulative and narrow-minded that it's not at all clear how their children are managing not to be like them. 

These are the distant, controlling rich parents we've met in many a Hindi film (think of Shenaz Treasurywala's parents in Delhi Belly, or Imran Khan's in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu), and I applaud Akhtar's desire to scale up them into full-fledged characters. Anil Kapoor is brilliant in comic mode - wait for the moment when he hides behind a tree, or the smug grin with which he sits up from a hospital bed. The tragically under-used Shefali Shah is better in the bitter moments, but even she has some exceptional scenes of black humour: "Acting kyon kar rahe ho?" she says to her suddenly romantic husband, deadpan. "Koi nahi dekh raha."

Such constant transitions from humour to high drama are not easy, and the actors do a fine job, even if the film doesn't always pull it off as a whole. Even Rahul Bose, cruelly miscast as Ayesha's preachy illiberal bore of a husband, manages some decent physical comedy on the tennis court. It's clear that Akhtar is aiming for something that sits between our love of melodrama and a sharply funny undercutting of it. The signature scene that exemplifies this is probably the one where a character threatens to cut her wrist -- with a butter knife. The deliberately dramatised climax, too, is of this ilk.

But when you've spent a whole film showing people as hypocritical control-freaks who're only concerned with what 'society' thinks of them, it's hard to believe in their last-minute changes of heart. No matter what the film's most ridiculous device -- the family dog Pluto, pontificating on human foibles in the voice of Aamir Khan -- tells us, it's hard to believe these unpleasant people have a dil that dhadkos after all. We can but try.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 June 2015. 

Film Review: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu

This week's review column for Firstpost.

Rahul Kapoor is the depressing sort of good boy who wears the ties his dad tells him to. Worse, he works at a job that his dad picked (an architecture firm in Las Vegas) and dates a girl his mom thinks is good for him (the daughter of one of her social acquaintances). For 25 years, he’s been plodding obediently along the track his parents have laid out for him: never quite aceing it, but never really falling sufficiently behind for them to notice. Until now, when in the space of a week, he a) loses his job; b) spends a drunken Christmas Eve with a talkative girl he met at the supermarket; and c) wakes up on Christmas morning married to aforementioned girl.

They part after breakfast, having agreed that it was all a silly mistake and that an annulment is the order of the day. But next thing he knows, the girl is back at his doorstep, and soon thereafter, sleeping on his drawing room couch. The next two weeks are a whirl of job interviews, relationship advice, dates with exes and birthday jamborees, during which, predictably enough, love happens.

But debutante director Shakun Batra (who was Second Assistant Director on Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na in 2008, First Assistant Director on Rock On the same year) has made a rom-com that is also a coming-of-age story – more so than Ayan Mukherjee’s Wake Up Sid (also a Karan Johar production), Ek Main… is less about finding love than it is about finding life. Alright, finding life through love.

In this classic ‘opposites attract’ narrative, Batra’s decision to cast both Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor completely according to type is a very wise one. Imran, though never a scintillating screen presence, shows yet again how tremendously likable he can be in the right hands. As the guy who confesses to ironing his socks and underwear, brushing his teeth three times a day, and “liking things clean”, Imran is suitably stilted, bumbling and overwhelmed. He brings a quiet, understated honesty to the emotional moments that fits his character far better than high-strung histrionics.

As for Kareena, it’s fun to watch her return with full enthusiasm to the bubbly girl act she perfected years ago as Geet Dhillon in Jab We Met (2007); even more so after a worrying year spent playing Mrs Shah Rukh Khan and potential Mrs Salman Khan. Best of all, the role isn’t quite as cookie-cutter as it may read on paper: Riana Braganza is bubbly, yes, but also a little older, a little less oblivious, and with just a little more life experience under her belt than Geet.

Riana is a hair-stylist, a vocation that is clearly a nod to Ayesha Devitre, who co-wrote the screenplay and dialogues with Shakun Batra, and has been the hairstylist for films such as Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Rocket Singh, F.A.L.T.U and Mere Brother ki Dulhan. The movie adopts a light-hearted tone right from the opening montage of four types of parent-child relationships. And the plot unfolds like a diary, starting each day with a title that reads like an entry by Rahul, as in, ‘Day 5: I am Wild’.

But the film never overdoes the cutesy onscreen scribbles or faux-family photos. It’s clever enough, but never overly so: a bit like the film’s protagonist whose moment of self-realisation comes when the girl he’s fallen in love with says to him with disarming honesty, “You’re perfectly average. Tum koi bhi cheez kam ya zyaada nahi karte”.
For the boy who’s spent his entire life trying desperately to win medals for a father who’s “still waiting for the gold”, this is a life-altering revelation. Ek Main… is the rare Hindi movie where the hero is average, and is okay being so.

The movie strikes a blow not just against heroic heroes but also against pushy parenting. The marvelous Ratna Pathak Shah and Boman Irani, cast as Rahul’s ridiculously infantilising parents, give the film some of its funniest moments, and also its most chilling. To their credit, Batra and Devitre have created characters who are over-the-top without ever becoming pure caricature. But it’s the two actors who give these scenes a devastating recognisability, be it the steely look in Irani’s eye as he tells his son that a particular meeting is going to be “very important”, or the obliviousness of Pathak Shah as she distractedly puts off her son’s every attempt to talk to her.

The ‘other side’ is represented by Riana’s warm, constantly-ribbing-each-other family. Their ‘chilled-out’ approach to parenting is summed up by her story about her dad who — far from forbidding her to — would jump up and down on the bed with her as a child (resulting in a fracture for him and two broken teeth for her). Despite the formulaic fact that her laidback family is, what else, Catholic, the depiction never feels anything but affectionately real. Just like the film itself.