We Are Family

Director: Siddharth P Malhotra

Actors: Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Aanchal Munjal, Nominath Ginsburg, Diya Sonecha

It’s this thing about soppy chick flicks, or afternoon soppy soap operas, if you will. The male character is destined to severe step-mom treatment. If he’s present at all, he usually has no say in his own destiny. He quietly follows nature’s will. Humour is generally scarce. This fits in well with the female worldview, perhaps (okay, that’s a joke!). It doesn’t help include varied audiences.

Arjun Rampal plays that muted, pointless gent in this movie adapted from Chris Columbus’s Stepmom (1998). To be fair, Rampal gets better playtime in the Indian adaptation. And he also looks suitably dishy for his target audience, as We Are Familyagainst a bald, old, divorced, charmless Ed Harris, who’s in with a girl (Julia Roberts) hotter than his vintage, in the Hollywood version.

Rampal’s the “strong, silent types”, who tells his girlfriend (Kareena), “Never say, I love you. It (the love) goes away.” The scene appears early on in the film. It’s a sweet promise of subtlety, hardly met by the movie thereafter. Unfortunately.

The leading man also has an alternate family: a divorced wife (Kajol), two daughters, and a son, who seems pretty low on the brat-quotient, ‘feminised’ perhaps in the company of women. Their mother is terminally ill. The kids are introduced to the dad’s young, sassy girlfriend they’re unlikely to accept, given the obvious circumstances. They call her D, short for daayan (witch), rather rustic nickname from children born and raised in Australia!

The setting is the sanitised First World. Spaghetti's ready for supper. Aesthetics of modern, good housekeeping is established. As it is, for most urban Hindi films by now. The women (Kajol, Kareena) the film centres on, arguably make for the brightest big screen Bollywood talents. The shots are tightly clean.

It’s just the idea that binds all these together, which is entirely outsourced from the West. So is an Elvis hit, with lyrical Hindi additions that go: “Main toh bhool gayi kya wordings thi (I forgot what the words were), something something, Jailhouse Rock!” Jesus knows this Indian poverty (of imagination) is not new. This film is merely its rare, official acknowledgement. The producers have suitably paid for the copyrights. They’re not sneakily thieving this time! There may be hundreds of original local writers waiting for a medium to express something of their own, through the nation’s top leading ladies, no less. But then, creative laziness is not a moviegoer’s concern. The film is. English movie-rental, or Indian readymade remake: who cares?

A warm, doting single mother, losing before her eyes, her life and her sweet children to fatal cancer, you can tell, is something that’ll weep any woman off her feet. The premise is stuff dry tissues are made for. Yet, the pathos here is produced not from moments, but from performances alone: a stunning Kajol’s in particular. She appears superior to Susan Sarandon, I suspect, because the corny background score here, unlike the quietness of the original, rarely allows for sheer drama to take over. She also cannot quite place her family in the fakeness around, which can’t be concealed in candyfloss anymore. This ain't Archie Andrews.

This is an Indian family drama over a dying single mom. Most such families would have a support stream of parents, uncles, aunties, many other relatives, pooling in at this tragedy. The mom’s hip, self-sufficient, in control, alone; despite an ex, and his hot girlfriend. The children look lost. This cultivated suaveness is but suddenly forgone as everybody begins to simultaneously weep from the screen. The heroine morphs into the image of the desi mother, in a saree, hoping the best for her daughter’s grand wedding after her death. Bollywood dhol beats hit the crescendo. Filmmakers hope you’ll hear the lady behind you go, sob sob sob… Hmmm.

Columbus discovered America in the 15th century. But he mistook it for India. Over 500 years later, in a film originally directed by Columbus, the confusion between the two cultures (and countries) still persist. Huh. It’s only fair!

Some films are good to look at. Some feel good at heart. Very few mainstream films manage to look as good on the surface and also capture the heart. "We Are Family" is equally appealing from the outside and at the heart.

It doesn't take us long into the narration to realize that the debutant director has his own ideas on how urban man-woman relationships work. Siddharth Malhotra brings the traditional compassion and large-heartedness of Sooraj Barjatya's films into the same line of vision as the urban fables about the man-woman relationship of Gulzar's "Ijaazat" and Govind Nihalani's "Drishti". The brew is invigorating and often very very moving in the way movies stopped moving us a long time ago.

The basic premise and even chunks of sequences and dialogues are taken from Chris Columbus' "Stepmom". Are Kajol and Kareena Kapoor as powerful in portraying the wife and the other woman as Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in the original?

What if one says the two divas in the desi "Stepmom" are far more empathetic in their understanding of the complexities of a marriage that has not quite terminated and the alternative relationship which doesn't know where to go without disrespecting the earlier relationship? Kajol and Kareena share a compelling partnership in portraying a household that's run by two women.

The intricacies of the triangle are worked out with heartwarming delicacy, so much so that you wonder why the director needed to keep any of elements from the Hollywood film. "We Are Family" takes the "Stepmom" saga to another level. It's an urban fable told with subtlety and a softness of touch which completely avoids excesses of emotions until the last ostensibly gut-wrenching finale when the narration gets excessively melodramatic.

The rest of the film is remarkably devoid of extravagant emotions even though the situation described and defined by the plot is susceptible to acute bouts of overt emotion. Having three actors who know how to play down the pitch without taking away the edge in the narration surely helps the situation.

Kajol needs absolutely no recommendation. Her transformation from physically healthy but restless in soul, to a dying but spiritually healed entity happens right in front of our eyes. The little-little things she does with her eyes and lips just rips a hole in our soul. Yup, she is one of our all-time greats - without trying. The moments when she watches Shreya (Kareena) take charge of her children and husband find Kajol expressing a mixture of envy and resignation the way only she can.

But it is Kareena Kapoor who is an utter revelation. Never before has she demonstrated such a complete understanding of her character's inner life. To the role of Kajol's husband's girlfriend Kareena brings a rare and reined-in passion. Everything that she has done so far on screen is undone as Kareena redefines the role of the Other Woman in Hindi cinema.

Admirably the 6(!!) screenplay writers have worked overtime on Kareena's part. She could easily have been the bitch who steals Kajol's husband away. As written in the script, Kareena comes across as flesh blood tears - and yes, as a woman of great beauty.

Arjun Rampal has been constantly evolving as an actor. Here he balances out the powerhouse performers on both his sides with a deeply felt emotional binding presence. And by the way, he dances better than Kajol and Kareena in the disappointing 'Jailhouse Rock' number.

Sensibly, Siddharth Malhotra has avoided the temptation of too many confrontational moments between Kajol and Kareena. We wouldn't have wanted this tender-sweet look at a shattered family's attempts to hold the fabric of their togetherness in place to end up looking like one of those T. Rama Rao mera-pati-sirf-mera-hai kitsch-kitsch-hota-hai stale-tales from the 1980s.