In director Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons two brothers go back to their family home in Coonoor after five years. But really, it could’ve been anywhere.
The sun never seems to tear through the layer of cloud always hovering above this hill station, with greenery seen at every possible corner. It’s the kind of place that happily exists only in nostalgia. If you try to grasp it, it might as well plunge deeper into the pit of memories until it becomes elusive altogether.
The movie starts as broadly being about the workings (or lack thereof) of a family that gets ‘completed’ for that brief period in time when Rahul (Fawad Khan) and Karan (Sidhharth Malhotra) return home. It begins as whimsically, with grandpa Kapoor’s (Rishi Kapoor’s) absurdities unfolding alongside the quirks of the family and then it seductively starts tugging you in to the lives of these disparate characters; their need of urgency is brushed off in their own self-effacing manners, and then becomes a full-blown melodrama of a dysfunctional family.
This, however, hardly takes away from the joy of watching the heartfelt fare.
For most parts, director Batra keeps the tone charmingly restrained. For all the fanciful humour grandpa Kapoor is pre-disposed with, there is the responsible son Rahul whose need for ground rules serves as the balancing act. This keeps the movie from skewing into being one of those vaguely familiar and impossibly absurd Bollywood fares.
For all fiery disagreements the parent Kapoors (Ratna Pathak & Rajat Kapoor) have, there is Karan whose understandable distance keeps it from escalating further, saving the movie from being a mawkish throwback to an era where familial crisis turned the heroes into contemptuous ball of anger.
For a while, I wondered why the family never seemed to get along.
It begins as whimsical, with grandpa Kapoor’s absurdities unfolding alongside the quirks of the family. It then seductively starts tugging you in to the lives of these disparate characters.
But this was before the movie uncovered more layers of its myriad characters living with their own conflicts; some palpable spewing shame in their lives, and others that are more ideological but equally, or more, deep-rooted nonetheless.
In the movie, Coonoor is that Neverland whose charming manors and homes are real, but it’s physical location is only hinted at in road-side signs in passing shots and brief mentions slipped between genial conversations.
The brothers have long left home to settle in their respective lives in different places (London and New Jersey; we’re told through title cards).
These returnees, especially Karan, seem to be returning to the space that unfolds in their own deep-rooted nostalgia which is really an idea than reality.
Then there is Tia (Alia Bhatt), a sprightly orphan holding on to the last remnants of her family property. She’s returned to the estate from her Mumbai home for the ‘last epic party’ before selling it off. At least Tia knows that looking ahead and marching forward is the only way out.
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