I did not review Zoya Akhtar's multiplex hit “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara” for this paper – and I didn't have to. I'd already reviewed “Wake Up Sid” in 2009, where I wrote, “It has all the weight of a television commercial showing sad people transforming into happy people in the course of thirty seconds, which is to say that nothing ever seems to be at stake.” And of “Rock On,” in 2008, I wrote, “But that's a practical way of looking at life, and [this] is, above all, a story of dreams and dreamers.”
The point in recalling these older reviews is that with “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara” we're recalling these older films – and the film that birthed it all, “Dil Chahta Hai,” which, ten years later, is still the most affecting, most bracing, most honest coming-of-age film from modern-day Bollywood. Its descendants are happy to inherit its vibe, its coolness, its Indo-Western hipness, but elsewhere they are content to settle for easy epiphanies. The eponymous rich brat of “Wake Up Sid” resolves to leave home, but he instantly moves in with a girl-friend, the kind of friend who can afford to redecorate her house before she lands a job, and his existential crises thereon unfold at the level of his learning to fry an egg.
And in “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara,” the Abhay Deol character, Kabir, struggles to come to terms with his hasty engagement to Natasha, a girl he likes but does not love. Like Preity Zinta's easily caricatured one-note boyfriend in “Dil Chahta Hai,” Natasha is fleshed out as an emotional manipulator, a suspicious nag, a clinger – and you have to wonder why so obvious a talent as Zoya Akhtar has to make it so easy to identify with this girl being dumped. We experience not a twinge when she is let go. She deserves it, we tell ourselves. Kabir deserves better.
The affluent characters in these films experience life-altering revelations with as much effort as sinking into a warm bubble bath. Or at least, the audience isn't allowed to “see” too much of their discomfort; we're simply asked to enjoy, vicariously, this angst-free acquisition of emotional truth, amidst plush production values that make us feel that we should all have these problems, these eye-catching problems, and their greeting-card solutions. (“Smell the roses, and perhaps a couple of peonies too!”)
“Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara” and “Rock On” and “Wake Up Sid” are well-crafted films, glutted with good writing and acting and startling moments of discovery, and that's why it's baffling that they excuse themselves from genuine emotion. What if Natasha were a really nice girl, really in love with Kabir, and has waited for him a long time, and then he — for whatever reasons (maybe he fell for someone else) — faces the unpleasant but manful task of telling her he wants out.
There is a superb moment in James L Brooks' “As Good As It Gets,” an often rewarding and often frustrating drama, where Helen Hunt's character is mother to an asthmatic son, and her date finds himself unable to handle the child's spasmodic coughing. He leaves her home somewhat abashed, with the excuse that it's too much reality for a Friday night. Could that be the thought driving these multiplex filmmakers, who want their audiences to experience, on their Friday nights, something borderline-real without rubbing their noses in reality?
These films, therefore, are enjoyable on a superficial level, at an easy level, with real-life wrinkles airbrushed away with the skill of a “Playboy”-centrefold designer. And who will deny Zoya her success? She has learnt from the failure of her first feature, the commendable “Luck By Chance,” which laid bare the sweaty and dishonourable struggles behind professional success. It showed us what people can be like with their blinkers on and when they want something badly, and it made us squirm at the recognition of our own ethical compromises, which it reflected in an uncompromising glare – in other words, it was a little too much reality for a Friday night.
