Quirky, Poignant and Fun:  Kapoor and Sons’ Unique Approach to 

Family Feuds

A row between husband and wife that starts with a leaking pipe and ends with their financial troubles – the parents’ subtle partiality towards the elder son and the consequent resentment of the younger one – a genuine bonding between the two brothers, in spite of their brewing tensions – a quirky grandfather who cracks bawdy jokes with his grandkids, frequently fakes death to gain attention, but also brings the entire family together, under the pretext of a family photograph. What happens when all these ingredients come together? You get a refreshingly fun, yet heartwarming family drama called Kapoor and Sons.

The brilliance of writers Shakun Batra and Ayesha Devitre Dhillon lies in portraying utterly familiar situations in the most natural manner. Realistic dialogues make the banter between the brothers, the snide exchanges between the Kapoors and the emotional outbursts; extremely relatable. All the characters are finely layered, each endowed with their merits and vulnerabilities. The message is simple:  we must accept our family with all their imperfections, for, as Tia (Alia Bhatt) says in the movie – “You should be happy that you have a family”. But Batra and Dhillon never hammer the message into the audience.

Batra’s subtle direction prevents the movie from becoming pedantic. When the brothers come home after five years, Batra merely shows us their rooms. The older one’s room has been kept just the way it was, while the younger son’s room has been occupied by the mother, as is evident from her clothes hanging in the wardrobe. These two shots are enough to demonstrate the parents’ partiality towards the older son – an issue that will recur throughout the family fights.  

Another smart directorial move is the sparing use of background score. Even during climactic showdowns, Batra deliberately refrains from using any background music. As a result one can concentrate on the nuances of the actors’ performances. And that’s a treat when there are skilled actors like Rishi Kapoor, Rajat Kapoor, Ratna Pathak Shah, and Fawad Khan, essaying the roles of grandfather Kapoor, the father, Mr. Kapoor, the mother, Mrs. Kapoor and the older son, Rahul Kapoor, respectively.

All these performers unravel the layers of their characters with perfect élan. Thus, we laugh at their quirks, get angry at their meanness, cry with them as they reveal their insecurities and pain. But we never judge them. Though not as competent as the others, Sidharth Malhotra (Arjun Kapoor), too, brings a charm to the light-hearted scenes and certain poignancy to Arjun’s pain at being constantly slighted by his parents. Alia Bhatt shines both as the chirpy girl-next-door and in the single emotional scene she gets. 

But the applause must go to Rishi Kapoor. It takes an actor of rare talent to make a lewd and frivolous old man absolutely hilarious without ever sinking into slapstick. At the same time, he makes your eyes well up when he begs his grandkids to come back home for one last family photograph.

In fact, Rishi Kapoor’s character maintains a taut balance between comedy and drama, preventing the script’s sentimentalism from degenerating into mawkish melodrama. Crisp editing also plays an important role in this balance. The ugly fights or the emotional outbursts never drag on. As we cut back and forth between grandpa Kapoor’s antics and the dramatic interactions, Rishi Kapoor’s character also offers a comically ironic lens to the entire family drama.

Using the songs, mostly as background music also keeps the narrative taut and realistic. It’s heartening to see that Batra does not fall into the usual trap of making the characters lip-sync to the numbers.

And thank god that the movie is not a love triangle. It’s a relief to see the brothers fighting over something other than a girl.

So, take a bow, team Kapoor and Sons. We finally have a family drama that’s real but not depressing; poignant but never mawkish.

Laptop: a memorable montage; not quite a memorable movie

A few hesitant piano notes sound in the background, a cello groans into life and some random images flash across the screen. A despondent man rides in an open truck, surrounded by his belongings, a car cuts through lush tea gardens, a blind man taps his way through city streets, a child peeks at a stranger from his father’s embrace, a pensive boy lies alone on a train berth. 

And a few cryptic words appear discreetly on the montage – “shift”, “windows”, “vision”, “memory”. 

As the promo closes with the title Laptop, familiar keypad terms resonate with new meaning. 

Be it in terms of performances, dialogues, cinematography, editing or music, subtlety defines most parts of Kaushik Ganguly's latest movie venture.

A line, a word or a gesture, amply etches nuances of characters and relationships, as men and women from various social and psychological backgrounds momentarily intermingle. A lower-middle class father’s (Pijush Ganguly) joy after buying a secondhand laptop for his 

computer-student son, finds expression in a rather lavish purchase of mutton. A rude, overbearing tea planter (Saswata Chatterjee) exposes his softer side in a single line about his surrogate child: 

“ছুটে এসে যখন বাবা  বলে  জড়িয়ে  ধরে  . . . তখন  মনে  হয়  . . . আমার  ছেলে ”. 

A blind author (Kaushik Ganguly)   offers a unique “vision” of reality, claiming that his “characters” save him from loneliness. His subsequent rendition of “এই  লভিনু  সঙ্গ  তব  সুন্দর  হে  সুন্দর ”, enriches both the song and the scene.

Brilliantly understated performances from veterans (Saswata Chatterjee, Arindam Sil, Rajesh Sharma, Rahul Bose) and youngsters perfectly complement this nuanced screenplay. Special mention must be made of Pijush Ganguly’s breakdown, following accusations of stealing, and Aparajita Adhya’s quavering voice as she desperately asserts her husband’s dignity against Arindam Sil’s scathing charges. Kaushik and Ananya move effortlessly from tenderness to sentimental sulking to downright bitterness, capturing various shades of an undefined relationship between author and typist. Churni's artificial manner of speaking highlights her strain in maintaining the decorous veneer of a posh tea planter's wife. Gaurav balances the naïveté and street-smartness of Jion with perfect élan. His half-truths bring a smile while his helpless gasps following the exposé are heartrending.

Sirsa Roy’s cinematography and Mainak Bhaumik’s seamless editing create some lasting cinematic moments. A mundane close-up of milk blending in tea, suddenly morphs into a womb-image with an incessant heartbeat in the background. The author’s (Kaushik Ganguly) wonder about pervasive human fear of death, despite the everyday demise of our dreams and relationships, cuts to a long shot of Rajesh Sharma, a funeral truck driver. With Kaushik’s philosophical musings in the background, the camera slowly pans on Sharma, sleeping peacefully in the vehicle.  

Yet such crisp editing becomes a bane elsewhere in the movie, leaving several unanswered questions. We see Jion fiddling with the newfound laptop and staring at Raya’s (Ridhima Ghosh) photos in it. But we never know what exact information he derives from the machine and how. Consequently his discovery and pursuit of Raya remain completely unconvincing.

Glaring holes in the plot and unnecessarily dramatic twists further mar a potentially brilliant film. How does a poor driver (Rajesh Sharma) steal the laptop from a swanky medical clinic and that too from the director’s office?  Why does the clinic’s laptop contain information about the director’s daughter? The hurried pace of  the Jion-Raya track leave nagging queries in its wake. Arindam Sil orders Jion’s family to leave the city within a day and they conveniently move to their ancestral home in Malda. Such melodramatic twists destroy the otherwise realistic tenor of the film. In a bid to focus on the surrogacy angle, the writer rushes through the first half, ignoring significant details about the laptop’s initial journey. Thus despite many laudable elements Laptop remains a montage of a few moving moments but fails to be a memorable movie.