I found myself simultaneously itching for something to happen and grateful that the film was content to just drift along, with characters bobbing like corks on a tranquil lake. And for the longest time, Dear Zindagi seems to exist in a narrative limbo. Kaira keeps falling in love and before she can fall out of love, she bolts. When I’m in love and when I’m not.” It’s a curious confession, for what other state is there? Shouldn’t she always be drinking Coke? And then we find out.
She tells her amused companion, “I drink only on two occasions. In an early scene at an airport bar, Kaira orders a Coke. It’s a wonder they didn’t rope in NIMHANS for a product-placement deal. This normalisation of a process that’s still something of a novelty in our country is the film’s biggest achievement. She’s in therapy the way she’d be at the dentist’s because of an aching tooth, or at the family doctor’s because she was running a temperature of 101. She isn’t hurting herself (though she certainly is hurting), and she isn’t hurting others. Mental-health issues in our films have always been about ten-ton conditions: Asperger’s ( My Name is Khan) Alzheimer’s ( U Me Aur Hum), schizophrenia ( Raat Aur Din, Karthik Calling Karthik), autism ( Barfi!), or in the films of the 1960s, mental-health patients cowered in bed as the nurse advanced menacingly, holding voltage clamps. He’d better accept cards, else there’d be no movie – Kaira would be standing at ATMs all day long.ĭo films on issues senstitise us to them? Or do we just watch films as entertainment, make clucking noises for a couple of hours, and return to our homes, to our default settings? If you believe the former, Dear Zindagi is a quiet little revolution. He comes with an MBBS degree, and he charges 3000 an hour. But this time, the therapist (Jahangir ‘Jug’ Khan, played by Shah Rukh Khan) is really a therapist. In a sense, Bhatt has always been on the couch – with friends and scruffy abductors serving as impromptu therapists, healing her soul scars. She gets longer scenes in which decades-dormant issues against family erupt, as others sit around stupefied ( Highway). She gets long scenes in which she dredges out a painful past from a repressed corner of her psyche ( Highway, Kapoor & Sons, Udta Punjab). She has abandonment issues ( Shandaar, Kapoor & Sons). Bhatt’s character, Kaira, suffers from insomnia (we saw that in Shandaar). In a sense, Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi is a greatest-hits compilation of Alia Bhatt’s career.
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