Dil Dhadakne Do is like a really long episode of Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai where Satish Shah doesn’t show up, says Raja Sen.
A round-trip luxury cruise is a perfect metaphor for Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do: it’s glossy, it’s picturesque, everything on board costs far more than it ought, there are some pretty people, a few of whom make a scene, a family shakes a leg quite memorably, there is some motion sickness and -- for something that ends up precisely and predictably where it started -- it takes a helluva long time going nowhere.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing.
We need great movies and trashy movies and insightful movies and clever movies, sure, but sometimes we duck into a darkened theatre looking for comfort food, and that’s when we need movies that do just what they promise on the label.
Modest ambitions notwithstanding, Dil Dhadakne Do takes a while to hit its stride, starting off choppy and feeling -- at least for the first ninety of its indulgent 170 minutes -- like a weak sitcom.
Society types sniping at one another while the background score functions like a laugh track? Ouch.
It’s like a really long episode of Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai where Satish Shah doesn’t show up.
And it doesn’t help that in DDD, the narrator is a dog.
The Mehra family, the frustrated foursome at the heart of this film, have a fifth member, an adorable bullmastiff who happens to be narrating the film. (Not kidding). And he’s voiced by Aamir Khan. (I wish I were kidding.)
Thus does Aamir’s Pluto Mehra pontificate on about people and their peculiar ways, but this too-literal voiceover -- filled with homilies about how strange humans are -- is shockingly reminiscent of Khan’s last film, PK (external link), where he played an alien, filled with homilies about how strange humans are.
The gimmick could conceivably have been cute, but the film embraces it as an afterthought: it’s fundamentally messed up that Pluto has nothing to do in the entire movie except talk reproachfully about people; and secondly that Khan, delivering platitudes written by Javed Akhtar, does so with a disturbingly pompous all-knowing voice.
Snapdeal-Dhadakne-Do, the dog appears to be saying.
The project is lifted by a couple of actors, Anil Kapoor and Ranveer Singh playing the Mehra father and son and injecting Dil Dhadakne Do with energy and repose respectively.
The film is about a family on a cruise with their friends, a nearly-bankrupt family taking a last-gasp holiday because saving face is too important, and it is Kapoor’s undying ebullience and Singh’s perplexed inwardness that defines the film and sets it on course.
Zoya Akhtar’s film doesn’t provide much insight and leans too heavily on repetitive, sitcom-like reaction shots to underline its own obvious points over and over again -- this is a film that generalises too much, one where all the parents are regressive, all the women are marriage-bait -- but in the cacophony of these belaboured caricatures, Singh provides tremendous calm and brings nuance to the table.
He’s excellent.
It’s as if an understated actor from a Pakistani TV show walked out into a deafening Balaji crowd.
To be fair, however, the crowd is mostly on point.
Farhan Akhtar, who has done a spiffy job with the film’s often sardonic dialogue, is rather charming in the film.
Shefali Shah is reliably strong as an unhappy, delusional wife, though she does appear to be channeling Shabana Azmi too much, and intriguing new actress Ridhima Sud is memorably cool as a young girl who knows when her shotglass needs another splash.
The striking Priyanka Chopra can carry of a yellow sun hat with immense flair, but her Beyoncé-level swagger (and her auditioning-for-America accent that randomly makes some English lines jar) is at odds with her character’s innate mousiness in front of her parents.
Anushka Sharma, playing a dancer but assuredly more comfortable on stage here than during her last debacle (external link), is pretty great here as she concocts heady chemistry with Singh, the two infectiously grinning at each other as they fool around.
Sharma and Singh are smashing together, starting off their courtship hurriedly, with the kind of conversation people used to have on the Internet back in the day -- throwing factual stats about their life out onto the table as if playing verbal Uno -- but rather than seeming unnatural, it works because they make it seem believable that these two characters urgently want to get really close really fast.
Sharma, more world-weary, is at times hesitant, and Singh -- playing a leading man, who, refreshingly enough, has achieved nothing and knows nothing about where he’s headed -- approaches the romance bullishly, in that reckless way we do when we finally know what we want.
There’s a fine, fine moment where he pins her down and declares his love to her theatrically, in blustery, Bollywood-y dialogue, and she yanks him down for a kiss -- tenderly, yes, but also simply to shut the fool up.
There is much, thus, that is wrong with Dil Dhadakne Do -- the way it treats chauvinism as an absolute aspect of personality, the awful Priyanka Chopra plotline, the total lack of progressive parental figures on board the ship (where is that Daadi from Queen when you really need her?) -- but it has a few sharp character-driven moments and, unlike most Hindi films, it ends stronger than it started, an impressive feat considering it always intended to finish things off in obviously feel-good fashion.
Despite its flaws, I find myself looking back at Dil Dhadakne Do and smiling.
Because of Kapoor, a man who is unerringly good when given enough elbow room, and here he’s silver-maned and smooth and selfish and playing his part with superb gusto.
His character is so self-obsessed that in his head he’s frequently confounded by just how obvious things seem to him and not the rest of the world, and Kapoor is superb as he restlessly swells up while waiting for everyone else to catch up to his genius.
And because of Singh, who owns his moments of frustration, of resignation, of outrage, of wry comebacks.
There is a scene where he loses all his calm and throws out the facts threateningly, like a grenade bobbed at his family, that he’s in love with a girl.
“She’s a dancer and a muslim,†he says, daring them to react, and Singh is scarily good. But he’s even better when wordlessly standing on the deck, helplessly looking at his own shoes instead of daring to embrace his sobbing sister.
Dil Dhadakne Do translates to let the heart beat.
The heart, it wants what it wants, and that’s all very well, especially if it wants the kind of watery climaxes where hugs solve everything.
But ah, how I wish this film hadn’t gone doggystyle.
Rediff Rating:Â 
Image:Â Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma in Dil Dhadakne Do