Dil maange more than Mandakini

Does a "modern young girl" have to be a giddy flibbertigibbet on some sort of sugar rush?

April 01, 2016 04:18 pm | Updated October 18, 2016 12:51 pm IST - Chennai

A still from Kapoor & Sons

A still from Kapoor & Sons

So many people asked me to watch > Kapoor & Sons that I finally did. I caught the night show in Escape in a houseful hall, with an audience that laughed and sighed and clapped loudly at the end. It’s that kind of film — all empathy and bonding and feel-good.

And it’s made beautifully, in the sort of nice, understated way that Indian filmmakers are doing so well these days. Like > The Lunchbox or > Finding Fanny . It is sweet, sad, funny and real and you think you would like to be part of such a mad family and live in a rundown bungalow in Coonoor, and chase dogs and pick flowers and drink beer with an attractive guy in a dodgy joint.

But unlike the films I mentioned above, which were also about dysfunctional families and relationships, Kapoor & Sons is not really a “modern” film at all. Not if you understand “modern” as willing to push the envelope a little bit, going out just that much further on a limb. What it does is to simply take the status quo and present it faithfully. Fathers, mothers and sons do the things they have always done; nobody breaks a rule or says anything startlingly new.

It feels mean to complain, but in a sea of conformist films that itemise and commoditise and stereotype women, is it so wrong to expect that the rare good films would take the trouble to etch out their females better? Take Alia Bhatt’s character. Does a “modern young girl” have to be a giddy flibbertigibbet on some sort of sugar rush? She drinks beer, smokes joints and plays harebrained pranks in a state of hyper-cuteness overdrive that makes you want to shake her hard and sit her down. I get it — we are supposed to cue “broken” from all this frenzy, but I cued “lazy”. It would take much harder but also infinitely more sensitive scriptwriting (and acting) to tone her down, make her mature, intelligent, sensitive, and yet give her a disturbed past and a sense of humour.

Take the scene where she can’t change a fuse, for instance. It would have been great if she could have. Just a tiny scene that could have established her self-sufficiency, given she is alone in the world.

Then there’s the mother, played by Ratna Pathak, who etches her given role superbly. But why would you not — given this fantastic cast, this bright story — write a better role for such a pivotal person? Must she be the wronged woman? Must she always be cooking? Must the business she sets up be catering? Must she keep folding clothes?

The film could have pushed boundaries by making her a doctor or a retired executive. She could have yet reacted and interacted with her family in exactly the ways Sunita Kapoor does, because these are instinctive, deeply personal reactions. But with just a different back-story, the contours of a film can change.

Or what if the same Punjabi homemaker had grown bored of her life and lack of money and decided to have an affair? What if the husband and sons had to figure out how to cope? That’s the sort of slightly edgy storyline it would be legitimate for me to expect in 2016 from a film written for and from an urban, “modern” perspective.

Incidentally, what was with the chubby, sex-crazed grandfather? I kept wondering if the real Mandakini watching the film might be a bit hurt at this reduction of her into a nonagenarian wet dream. The thing is, it’s harder to spot stereotypes when they are played sensitively in an otherwise good film. But that’s also the reason why the disappointment is more acute.

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