One Life To Live..

In Barsaat, yes, all the way back in 1949, when Raj Kapoor and Prem Nath went to the hills in a car, braving the wind and perhaps egged by boredom, they ran into love, tragedy, heartbreak and a life lesson or two. There have been many memories on wheels,  intrinsic to narratives like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi but why are we digressing? In 2001, Dil Chahta Hai made us feel the sun on our eyelids when three friends drove to Goa, soaking in the joy of the moment, the jokes only they understood but made us laugh too.

And in Zoya Akhtar’s latest offering Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, the car is in a way a metaphor for life. Would you for instance go on a road trip conveniently and in comfort or with the wind in your hair? And when you choose the latter and a moment tells you that you are in harmony with the world, will you wiggle your toes in the breeze? Watch the sunflower fields with a smile and the sky with a sense of wonder with your crinkled gaze and understand the meaning of being alive?

 Or like Javed Akhtar says, will you undertand that, “Jo apni aankhon mein hayraniyan leke chal rahe ho, toh zinda ho tum..
Dilon mein tum apni betaabiyan leke chal rahe ho, toh zinda ho tum!”
(If you walk with wonder in your eyes and a longing in your heart..you are alive)

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (ZNMD) is really about that sense of wonder we lose or misplace along the way. And the criticism the film will attract is the same that Dil Chahta Hai evoked all those years ago. That it is an elitist story about a bunch of shallow youngsters who really have no real issues and spend a good part of the film having fun and dismissing their playful demons. No one thought that way about Delhi Belly because it showed us ‘real’ things like stools and dirty living spaces and three guys running around in circles in Delhi’s innards. 

Remember also how Elizabeth Gilbert was slammed for going on an all expense paid journey to Italy, India and Indonesia to find herself? The criticism was that not everyone can afford such luxurious introspection. The point of that journey as the road trip in ZNMD is not so much the geography (though it looks delectable, courtesy the eye of cinematographer Carlos Catalan) but to leave the known, the familiar, the boxed in existence behind and live without fear and regrets and find something buried and release the past.

Her canvas may have become more expansive (and expensive) but Zoya Akhtar still has her eye for detail, her insight and her taste for irony intact as when a proud wife breaks into a eulogy about the “wind beneath her wings”(her husband) at a dinner table, embarrassing her would be son-in-law or when we see two friends packing their bags. One fastidious to a fault. The other careless beyond repair. And both their lives will need to break out of these patterns to be complete. And the one-liners (dialogues courtesy Farhan Akhtar. Is there anything he cannot do?)!

As when Hrithik Roshan’s Arjun compares deep sea diving to a high, a ‘nasha‘ and Laila (Katrina Kaif) reacts that intoxication is a negative word. Diving deep in the sea she says, is like meditation for her, when you become aware of your every breath and how wonderful it would be if we could live alive to each moment like that. The only time you should be in a box, she says, is when you are dead.  Or when she comes behind the man she is falling for, to say a memorable goodbye with a line, “I don’t like to live with regrets.”  

 And nothing is established in pat terms. The three friends have different personality types. Yes, we have seen the template in Dil Chahta Hai but these are not kids just out of college. One is about to get married. Another is married to his job. And the third is cracking up at everything and everyone but penning his secret self in a diary.

 There is obvious discomfort between  Arjun (Roshan) and Imraan (Farhan Akhtar) because of a woman they were both in love with in college. Arjun is now a high profile broker living for deadlines and boasts before friends he has grown distant from, how rich he is and how successful. Kabir (Abhay Deol) is trying to breathe in a suffocating relationship and Imraan (Akhtar)is the joker of the pack who sometimes steps on raw toes and can be occasionally insensitive.   

How the three find a comfort level they once shared as they help each other release their fears is not profound or deeply philosophical but uproariously entertaining. There is a pure, cleansing, uplifting and aspirational quality about the film that will make you come back to it on a dark day to watch Arjun breaking out of his cold introverted self to shed a tear because he just swam through the coral reefs. Or to see the easy, sunny camaraderie between an unselfconsciously beautiful Laila and the three boys. Or the almost lyrical snapshots of Spain. It is refreshing to see Hrithik Roshan underplay his mega wattage to play a normal 30 something trying to find where the joy in his life has gone.

 Farhan Akhtar has so many quips and such infectious charm that the girl next to me giggled everytime he raised even an eyebrow and there is the endearingly natural Deol playing a terminally nice guy after all the dark roles he has been exploring, breaking free in the climax to sprint for his right to live life on his own terms. Kaif  brings much sunshine to the proceedings  and has that beautiful asexual buddy like charm that allows her to bond with all three men and yet a certain stirring connectedness with the one she is drawn too.

Kalki Coechlin plays the high maintenance girl friend effectively. Naseeruddin Shah has a small cameo that shows us his class in just a few moments. 

There is beautiful poetry (Javed Akhtar) punctuating the levity and the music (Shankar Ehsan Loy) that sums up hopes and fears and resolutions.  The humour crackles consistently and never goes below the belt though a character does say “Shit happens!” The audience titters but decorously because it knows it is not that kind of shit.

The charm of the film lies in its small moments, not so much in a dramatic arc and as in another Excel production Rock On and in Dil Chahta Hai, the film ends on a note of completion, in the centred feeling of contentment when everything fits in your life. Your friends, a love just right for you and the self you always wanted to be. You go, Zoya Akhtar.

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )