Even inanimate objects show signs of giving way. Tia’s backstory, too, comes with a couple of corpses.
And a lovely scene between Arjun and Tia (Alia Bhatt), a girl whose house Rahul wants to convert into a writer’s retreat, unfolds in a cemetery. Another driver, in the same car at a later point, isn’t quite so lucky – it’s a fatal accident. There’s a death scare when a car careens off the road. (The film opens with an amusing scene where his face hits the dining table and Sunita, without missing a beat, continues to order the domestic help around.) Dadu talks about where he’d like to be buried. Dadu likes to keep pretending he’s fallen dead. Amarjeet – let’s call him Dadu, like the grandsons do, for part of the satisfaction of watching families on film is to project our own relations onto the people on screen – likes to play a game where he shoots his grandsons dead. It’s that Harsh’s father Amarjeet (Rishi Kapoor) has suffered a heart attack.ĭeath – or the shadow of it – is all over this deceptively light-footed movie.
The cause for this gathering, though, isn’t quite an occasion. Kapoor & Sons, set in Coonoor, owes a debt to the dysfunctional family drama that gets going when people who live apart are thrown together around an occasion ( Home for the Holidays, The Myth of Fingerprints). Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu played like a coming-of-age saga guided by the spirit of Wes Anderson. He’s the older son.) Another common factor between Batra’s two films: the Bollywood spin on Hollywood staples and styles. (Fawad Khan’s Rahul completes the family.
And look at the mother, Sunita (Ratna Pathak), who qualmlessly steps over one son to help out another. Or is it just coincidence that his films – Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, and now, Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) – are about sons scarred by puppeteering parents? Look at how Harsh (Rajat Kapoor) lashes out when he discovers his younger son Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra) has changed careers… yet again. Shakun Batra comes across like someone trying to work his issues out through his movies, the way writers exorcise their demons through stories.