Mar 20, 2016 12:26 PM
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Ever seen movies trying to recreate actual relentless conversations without a break requiring obviously multiple cameras and sharp editing. It is what differentiates standard cinema where cameras pause and wait for characters to finish their delivery and then the editors respectfully move to the second camera taking care to give enough screen time to egoistic actors. Now if an invisible camera were to move around, the home of four chaotic but people from everyday life,as they scream their way around each other and even frighten a visiting plumber, is what it could perhaps capture in Kapoor & Sons as it pans out for major part of its screenplay. You secretly wonder how the director knew this was the way our families operated.
A frustrated infidel hubby, a frantic homely wife with a mind of her own, who loves her two sons but unequally, the two sons one a successful novelist and other an aspiring one, who bump into a lively bubbly today girl who owns a home that one of the brothers aspire to buy. And hovering over this scenario is a cuddly 90 year old who insists on being naughty much to the delight of his grandsons and casual indifference of his harried son and his loving daughter in law. There is really no motive to the story to describe.
The dysfunctional family spends its time juggling various balls of affection, anger, jealousy, infidelity, humor amongst themselves and yet they seem untouched by hatred. You like each of them individually except when they interact painfully with each other. It is like a slice of their life brought to the screen with no start and no specific end. If the aspiration of the grandfather to have a family picture together can be treated as an end goal well then it does have an emotional motive. For he does not believe he will live long though he defies the hospitals and ill health, shocking nurses and grandchildren with his naughty porn affliction and I-papad jokes.
What keeps you gripped is the effortless and breathless narration as the characters go around their daily lives unaffected by a camera hovering around them. No posing for the camera, worrying about wrong angles, dialogues and emotions flowing out seamlessly.
Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak especially are a treat to watch as the couple over the hill trying to keep their relationship together despite the loud whispers of an affair on the sidelines. Fawad Khan looking dashing as the novelist perfect son who returns home and is sucked into a complicated patch-up with his less successful brother Sidharth Malhotra. The uber cool Sidharth is besotted with the lively Alia reprising her State 2 type of character, bold and forthcoming. Rishi Kapoor as the grandpa has a meaty role and easily the best lines that draw guffaws from the audience.
They all look real and extremely believable. Fallible as they are as human beings you pick up one of them as your favorites and root for them. Somewhere in your transparent conscience you know this is the dark closet that exists in every family that remains within the family to be covered by an all is well façade meant for the external world.
The direction works, the hyperventilating dialogue delivery works, the editor obviously had a lot of work to do and executed it efficiently, the music is easily forgotten and not required at all. The cinematography is good while it is outdoors but inside it struggles to keep pace with the relentless exchanges that happen and creates a hurting to the eye transition in some of the scenes.
So then why do you feel dissatisfied at the end? Is it what seems to be apparent lack of motive for the plot? The focus seems to be on delivering witty one liners(which works) but not working on assembling the individual excellences together. There is a tearing hurry in the execution. Some things remain difficult to digest. That a liaison in a small town remains unnoticed till a shocked son discovers it. Sometimes you get the feeling that the scenes stitched together make the plot and not the way round.
Obviously the naughty and bordering on the obscene dialogues work with the today crowd but it does get irksome when the talk about blue films and Mandakini s innocent sultry scenes in a Kapoor movie get dragged beyond comfort. The fact that somehow Rishi’s voice does not seem to gel with his overdone nonagenarian make up distracts. Alia springs to action whenever there is humor to be curdled out of teeny bopper situation. Sidharth is quietly efficient working with his smiles. Ratna Pathak steals the scenes whenever she is in while Rajat wears the role very believably. It is Fawad Khan you leave the theatre with, admiring. While good looks help, it is the finesse with which he bringsto life a mixed up personality angry with the pressures of having to keep unto an image, that impresses.
If only the director Shakun Batra had put in more purpose and zing into the extraordinary cast, witty one liners and outstanding editing and less very obvious proxy marketinging of cigarettes as the entire cast seems to highlight the virtues of cigarettes and sutta! it could have been unmissable. Even now it is any day better than the average stuff rolled out every week .When I came out of the theatre I felt it was a 2 ½ starrer but I would not put the accountability of bad behavior in a theatre of the young audience that actually reduced the impact, on to the movie.
