'We Are Family' (Hindi, Drama, 2010)
Director: Siddharth Malhotra
Cast: Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
The one laugh-out-loud moment in Siddharth P Malhotra’s 'We Are Family ' arrives through the bespectacled Ankush (Nominath Ginsberg), the sole son of divorced parents Aman and Maya (Arjun Rampal, Kajol).
The scene unfolds at the dinner table, with Ankush’s parents and sisters — the elder Aliya, the younger Anjali (Aanchal Munjal, Diya Sonecha) — and Aman’s girlfriend Shreya (Kareena Kapoor). Females outnumber males two to one.
The discussion gets going with little Anjali expressing an interest in her would-be-stepmother’s profession (fashion designing), while Aliya, very much daddy’s little girl rebelling against daddy’s new girlfriend, snaps that she’d rather be a writer-publisher, like her mother.
Like a tempestuous heroine in one of her forthcoming books, she storms out, Shreya trailing in her wake, while Maya declares that dinner is over. After all this distaff drama, Ankush leans over to his father and mumbles that he wants to become a cosmonaut but no one asked him.
I laughed because I felt his pain, but also because, unintentionally and with crystalline clarity, he underlines the film’s preoccupations.
This is a movie about women, and for women. It has no time for men — on screen, or in the audience. And yet, this remake of 'Stepmom' is hardly a feminist manifesto, given how shabbily it reduces Shreya to a spineless martyr.
When Maya is diagnosed with cancer and when Aman improbably says he’s moving back in with her, she extracts from Aman one of those only-in-the-movies promises, that he will not tell Shreya about her condition. Aman, therefore, dumps Shreya, the supposed love of his life, with utmost ignominy.
But soon, Maya asks Shreya to move in with them, in order to ease the kids’ transition to this woman who might eventually take her place, and Shreya does just that.
Like any self-respecting jilted lover, you expect she’ll unleash her wrath on Aman for not loving and respecting her enough to involve her in the decision to break up, but Shreya simply simpers that she’d have done the same thing had the daintily heeled shoe been on the other foot.
She chucks her career and becomes a full-time nursemaid to the children of the man who treated her like garbage. The message is that there’s a mother inside every woman, and it’s every woman’s duty to ensure that pesky career issues don’t come in the way of her true purpose on earth.
If 'Stepmom' retained a smidgen of believability, it was thanks to Ed Harris and Susan Sarandon, who looked like they’d graced this earth with a good number of their years, and the arrival of the coltish photographer played by Julia Roberts spiked their story with a frisson of fear — that decades of marital wholesomeness could come undone in the blink of an eye, and your children, already shuttling between homes and suffering for no fault of their own, could end up in the inexperienced hands of a stranger who might have been in high school when you exchanged your till-death-do-us-part vows.
Here, between Arjun Rampal, Kajol and Kareena Kapoor, there isn’t a widening gut, a drooping breast, a balding crown, a worry-creased brow. Firm and shiny as waxed fruit, they appear to be advertising parenthood as a cure for ageing: Have lots of babies, make those laugh lines vanish! They arouse not empathy but envy.
The bigger problem with 'We Are Family' is that it thinks throwing catastrophes at us at regular intervals, accompanied by a ridiculously syrupy score, is good drama. We’ve barely met the characters, and within the first ten minutes, a child is nearly run over by a speeding car.
We don’t actually get to know these people, and consequently, we never come around to caring about them. We snort, instead, that a full-family rendition of Jailhouse Rock is all that’s needed to cement splintered relationships. You no longer need shrinks or divorce lawyers, apparently. You just need Elvis.
baradwajrangan@expressbuzz.com