But these little moments lead to big emotions. When Rahul, after meeting his parents after a long time (he’s London-based), embraces his mother first, we don’t make much of it. When Tia says she’s scared of flying, it sounds, at first, like a throwaway bit, the lead-up to the comedy around Rahul’s fear of mice. Kapoor & Sons is exquisitely crafted, beautifully written. The fractured filmmaking mirrors these fractured ties. This happens over and over, a reminder of not just the messiness of it all, but also the interconnectedness of it all. Dadu’s card game with old pals turns into a bickering match just as Sunita and Harsh are duking it out elsewhere. Dadu and grandsons get stoned in a room while, nearby, mother and father try to remember the reasons they’re still on a bed together. The signature cinematic device is the constant cross-cutting between two scenes that, typically, would each be staged as a whole. Things are messier, befitting the chaos of familial ties. Here, even the “perfect bachcha” turns out not so perfect after all in his mother’s eyes. Everything was so meticulous, so formally composed (with that signature tracking shot, leading us into and out of places and emotional states), so perfect. This middle-classness, this light flirtation with (and subversion of) Bollywood tropes make Kapoor & Sons a more appealing affair than Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, which, for all its strengths, felt like an English film dubbed in Hindi. Plus, there’s a lot of weed use, which, come to think of it, may have solved a lot of the issues in the Raichand clan. Let’s just say this Rahul can look at a colour chart and point out orange from tangerine. And Rahul’s certainly not the kind of lover boy Shah Rukh used to play, with that name, in Johar’s films. The mother shows her love for her sons by preparing – you’d better be sitting down for this – not gajar ka halwa but… apple pie. Despite the photogenic threesome at the story’s centre, there’s no love triangle. Batra teases us with Bollywood clichés and then swerves in other directions. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham was a dysfunctional family drama too, but the closest we got to the waterworks was whenever Jaya Bachchan appeared on screen.
#Movie kapoor and sons cracked#
Yes, I said cracked plumbing – which may make Kapoor & Sons something of a watershed in the history of Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions. Even inanimate objects show signs of giving way. Tia’s backstory, too, comes with a couple of corpses. And a lovely scene between Arjun and Tia (Alia Bhatt), a girl whose house Rahul wants to convert into a writer’s retreat, unfolds in a cemetery. Another driver, in the same car at a later point, isn’t quite so lucky – it’s a fatal accident. There’s a death scare when a car careens off the road. (The film opens with an amusing scene where his face hits the dining table and Sunita, without missing a beat, continues to order the domestic help around.) Dadu talks about where he’d like to be buried. Dadu likes to keep pretending he’s fallen dead. Amarjeet – let’s call him Dadu, like the grandsons do, for part of the satisfaction of watching families on film is to project our own relations onto the people on screen – likes to play a game where he shoots his grandsons dead. It’s that Harsh’s father Amarjeet (Rishi Kapoor) has suffered a heart attack.ĭeath – or the shadow of it – is all over this deceptively light-footed movie. The cause for this gathering, though, isn’t quite an occasion. Kapoor & Sons, set in Coonoor, owes a debt to the dysfunctional family drama that gets going when people who live apart are thrown together around an occasion ( Home for the Holidays, The Myth of Fingerprints). Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu played like a coming-of-age saga guided by the spirit of Wes Anderson.
He’s the older son.) Another common factor between Batra’s two films: the Bollywood spin on Hollywood staples and styles. (Fawad Khan’s Rahul completes the family.
And look at the mother, Sunita (Ratna Pathak), who qualmlessly steps over one son to help out another. Or is it just coincidence that his films – Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, and now, Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) – are about sons scarred by puppeteering parents? Look at how Harsh (Rajat Kapoor) lashes out when he discovers his younger son Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra) has changed careers… yet again. Shakun Batra comes across like someone trying to work his issues out through his movies, the way writers exorcise their demons through stories.