REVIEW: Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SUPER RICH SOUL

Dil Chahta Hai, which released exactly 10 years ago, rejuvenated Hindi cinema with its youthful take on life and relationships. It celebrated friendship, freedom and the luxury of choice that an affluent new India was just learning to enjoy guiltlessly. It changed the way young people spoke in the movies, the way they dressed and conducted the business of living—not as cogs in the great Indian family wheel, but as individuals who put their own interests before that of others. Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is a retelling of the same story, minus the spark. 

It isn't that you can't appreciate three good-looking men taking off on a Spanish adventure to celebrate their friendship, indulge in their fantasies and overcome their fears. But a film like this, which is so cut off from the reality of most Indian lives reeks of upper class snobbishness—as though there's no way to  be free, except by going deep-sea and sky diving. And suddenly, when you hear the tune of "Saare jahan se achcha" as the boys are jumping off a fancy airplane into the Spanish countryside, it seems offensive even for someone as unpatriotic as yours truly. 

If you're meant to derive vicarious pleasure from their experiences, the film doesn't set that up well enough either. Because you don't connect with any of them—unlike DCH where all the three protagonists were believable and charming in their own ways. The crises these boy-men face then, are as superficial as the film itself—not that DCH had anything earth-shattering by way of existential philosophy, but Sid's relationship with Tara was interesting, as was Akash's falling in love after rejecting the very idea of love from the start. And Sameer was such a likable character sketch, you kept rooting for him throughout.

The most interesting of the lot in ZNMD is Farhan Akhtar's Imran, a writer who has recently discovered that the man who raised him wasn't his biological father, and must come face-to-face with his progenitor (who, providentially, lives in Spain). Imran is the only one who embodies the free-spirit that the film espouses—his poetry (penned by Javed Akhtar) infuses the artificiality of the proceedings with a semblance of meaning.

Abhay Deol and Hrithik Roshan get the raw end of the writers' stick—neither Kabir nor Arjun have any exceptional qualities to endear them to us. Kabir in particular, and his relationship with his betrothed Natasha (Kalki Koechlin), is inexplicably shallow. For a film written by two women (Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar), this possessive, nagging interior designer is a shocker. While the other woman in the story, Laila (Katrina Kaif in her most natural performance to date) believes people shouldn't be put in boxes, the script summarily buries Natasha's character in a box of conventional cliches. Laila, the face of the modern, foot-loose woman on the other hand, is totally cut off from the world and hence free to travel from London to Spain to Morocco and so on. 

Which isn't to say that the film isn't enjoyable in parts. Farhan Akhtar's dialogues are peppy with generous doses of tongue-in-cheek humour that enlivens the proceedings. Imran's on-going relationship with an expensive Hermes bag that Kabir has bought as a gift to Natasha is hilarious. The guided tour of Spain is soothing too, thanks to Carlos Catalan's splendid cinematography. And then in the middle of this five-star fantasy arrives Naseeruddin Shah in a five-minute cameo and injects it with a dash of genuine emotion. Which seems strangely misplaced in this soulless wonder of excess.