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Watching Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) is like reading a book you are slowly but surely falling in love with. A book that you read curled up in a window seat on a rainy day, with a cup of tea by your side, hoping that the story will never end because it makes you taste a slice of crumbly, homemade apple pie. And infuses the chill of fresh grief in your bones as a bereaved woman rubs her cold hands together and sits down to talk in broken sentences. And holds you by the hand and walks with you into the warmly glowing verandahs of hill cottages at dusk. Into lives that are not unlike our own.

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And once you walk in, you recognise characters you have met atleast once in your life. The wife with grey, straggly hair, her mouth curled perpetually to keep the rancid bitterness of betrayal in. The husband who does not even make eye contact with his wife except when the two are snarling like twisted beings  far removed from the world where love was simple, easy and uncomplicated. And they were whole. And together. He pores over the accounts of a defeated business and refuses to look up as she complains about the plumbing issues in the bathroom. He won’t praise her cooking and will mock her business aspirations, never acknowledge his part in her anger or frustration because he is atleast not a wife beater. And there are the children. Carrying their own silent, secret universes of pain and resentment.

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And the little cruel lies, omissions of kindness and love that sometimes spiral into life altering tragedies. The best part of Kapoor & Sons is that nothing about it is cosmetic, studied, false. Producer Karan Johar’s penchant for overstylised sets gives away to a home that is frayed at the seams, has an unkempt garden to reflect the emotional neglect the inmates subject each other to, a dripping bathroom and an air of unresolved angst. And there are the cleansing moments of sunshine when the family bonds over an old Hindi film song, an album and a birthday party. The way an old man with a neem facepack on his cheeks shares a joint with his grandsons and swaps wild stories.

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There is also something unusual about the writing (by Shakun Batra and Ayesha Devitre Dhillon) and the tuning of the scenes. The scenes do not have the staccato quality of screenplays that begin, unfold and end on a crisp note. Here each dialogue is a conversation, every scene is a series of moments seguing into more moments some of which do not show and tell you anything about the story but give you an insight into a character.

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Like the scene where Alia’s Tia is looking for sugar cigarettes and a snatch from her childhood in a grocery shop. Or the time Rahul (Fawad Khan), the “perfect baccha” of the family has wrecked his father’s car and is clowning around it while Arjun, the overlooked and underloved sibling (Sidharth Malhotra)  takes his pictures in a moment of rare camaraderie.

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And so many delicious asides. The plumber who walks into a family conversation about finances and is too afraid to ask for money in a “mushkil waqt.” Or the green lollypop instead of proper change at the toll booth. Or the moment in the hospital when in the middle of a conversation, we a see a body building aspirant lifting a child in a wheelchair. Or two young girls rolling their eyes in ecstasy as Fawad Khan walks around them, talking over the phone. Or grandchildren falling to the ground everytime their daadu sprays them with make-believe bullets. Not one single phoney moment here and we can safely say that Dharma Productions has come a long way from the overbaked melodrama of Kabhi Khushi, Kabhi Gham.  Jeffery F. Bierman’s unobtrusive cinematography is part of the flow rather than an outsider’s gaze.

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Unlike conventional Hindi film narratives, this one does not have a hero and a heroine and a set of supporting characters. It has a story where every character counts, has a place, something to overcome and resolve. This is not the milky, saccharine steeped world of Sooraj Barjatya with a leading man who despite being the exemplification of sanskars, must strip down to the waist atleast once. The only time you see the male body objectified here is when Arjun and Tia attend a body building contest and laugh as a friend jiggles his chest on stage. Speaking of objectification, Mandakini makes a come back as a laminated cutout!

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None of the actors look like they have strolled into a set to act for the day. They are like water colour tints that blur into each other’s lives and stories. Leading this pack are Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah, two solid, wonderfully nuanced actors. And what they get to do here is way beyond the one-dimensional portrayals of heads of the great Indian cinematic family.  They are people who cannot recognise each other or themselves. They are reactive, defensive, volatile and constantly need their children to pull them back from ugly spats. And the two actors live Harsh and Sunita from inside out. Their emotions though raw never become hyperbolic.

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Watch Kapoor as he tries to hold his wife’s shoulder for a family portrait and she shrugs. This one moment sums up the discomfort and unease that seeps into relationships of a lifetime when trust is broken, respect lost. This is an actor who never rubs your nose into a moment, no matter how charged it is. Ratna is pitch perfect whether she is cooking in her cluttered kitchen like an overstretched homemaker, or speaking in taut silences or breaking down over a jar of cookies or curling up in her bed right at the end to contain her pain, to numb it somehow.

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There is the uproarious Rishi Kapoor bringing the house down with inappropriate banter, raunchy jokes and an endless lust for life.
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Fawad Khan who was basically used as a one dimensional prop in his previous film Khoobsurat, is a flesh and blood character here. His Rahul begins as a boring prototype of the perfect Indian son but then we see him dancing on a seedy dance floor with a girl who has a crush on him, laughing helplessly over an innuendo with her while fixing a fuse, reading his brother’s manuscript on the sly, losing all perspective when he sees the truth about his parents’ marriage and also his poise when his mother confronts him about his sexuality. Despite being an immensely beautiful man, he keeps us grounded in his story as his eyes speak for him when he can’t. This is a serious actor, regardless of short-sighted fans who refuse to look deeper.
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 And Sidharth Malhotra. He is  an absolute revelation, here. His Arjun is a complexed, deeply hurt child, with  joy and anger mixed inextricably in his DNA. His body language, dialogue delivery and his watchful vulnerability make us root for him and there are a few moments that we know, we will remember always. That moment when he, an unsuccessful writer, shares what will be written on his tombstone, “Akhri baar likh raha hoon..yaad rakhna.” Or when Tia is trying to tell him what she feels when she is with him and he finishes her sentence with one word and it is the perfect word because it fits like they do.
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Alia Bhatt, for a very very young actor, has an almost uncanny command over her craft especially in that one big scene where she is describing the importance of saying goodbye to loved ones properly and crying over a missed chance.  Or even in that fleeting scene where she self-consciously sits up to say ‘Hi’ to a stranger during a Skype call and asks, “Who am I talking to?”
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Without seeming to say much, the film makes important points about redemption, forgiveness and kindness in a family unit as also about the prejudice against sexual orientation that many parents fixated with their idea of perfectionism cannot deal with.  Like everything else in the film, the ending too is a moment with no definite end. And so maybe we should expect a sequel. Or maybe not. Maybe like life, some films are better off without a conclusive The End. But yes, Shakun Batra is a voice that Hindi cinema must heed if it wants to rise above the jaded star system and formulaic story telling. Maybe, the next family film he makes can be about daughters. With his instincts, he will possibly get that one right too.
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Reema Moudgil is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of  Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a  translator who recently interpreted  Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an  RJ  and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US and is now retailing some of her art at http://paintcollar.com/reema. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.