Lights, Camera, Conversation… “Armchair Epiphanies”

Does the success of ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ indicate that multiplex audiences want their stories of redemption shorn of rough edges?

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… Everything is frustratingly preordained.” And, “But these bits of growing up are tucked away into inconsequential corners of the film, in song montages and the like, so we’re mainly left with the incessantly happy-cheery story of a boy and a girl getting together after a series of extremely minor hiccups. That’s not a bad way to spend a couple of hours, sure, but how you wish a few dashes of reality had been allowed to temper this unrelentingly feel-good fantasy.” The heft of a television commercial. The minor hiccups. The feel-good fantasy. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara has it all.

As did Rock On, in 2008, of which I wrote, “It’s really one of those white-collar wish-fulfillment fantasies like Shall We Dance, which equates happiness with putting home and career on hold while you go out and follow your heart and your passion.” It’s “a repackaging of a beloved Hollywood formula, and it needs [its] self-indulgent fictions in order to build to its patented uplifting ending.” And, “at least, if the film dealt honestly with the implications of these contrivances, we might have had something – but [the] direction takes its cues from the Farhan Akhtar School of Arty Disaffection, where being subtle appears to be the same as being scared to disrupt the clean composition of a scene with messy emotion. At times, this results in frames so lifeless, so juiceless, you’re not sure if you’re watching direction or art direction – a series of still lifes…” And, mainly, “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 when it’s time to find a job, a few clicks with his digital camera are all it takes for him to discover he’s a terrific photographer, and he’s instantly employed at the same magazine his friend works at.

In Rock On, we are asked to empathise with a band that split up because their debut album represented a compromised vision. The fact that seven of the band’s songs had found their way into the album, with only the eighth number being a commercial compromise, the dark work of unsympathetically painted recording company executives, is presented as a monstrous deal-breaker, when, in reality, aspiring rock groups would be happy if they got to put out a single. 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. (“Seize the day!” “Make the most of life, for we live but once!” “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.

I suppose that would be too much real life for the multiplex audience, at least according to these directors, and it is probably to their credit that, at least occasionally, they spike their party punch with a splash of raw whiskey – the scene in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara where a son wilts under an understanding but unapologetic father, the scene in Wake Up Sid where Sid’s friend rues their estrangement, the scenes in Rock On where a practical-minded wife eggs her spaced-out husband to descend to earth. 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. There’s no reason to invest in the outcome any more emotion than you’d invest in a nut-strewn candy bar. You close your eyes and chew and feel euphoric for a few minutes and toss the wrapper away and forget all about it. Who’s complaining when life lessons are so lip-smacking? 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.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Cinema: Hindi, Lights Camera Conversation