Create some space for emotions: Dil Dharakne Do

         Let the heart beat! Medically speaking, that's an involuntary action and one can neither prevent it nor cause it to happen! It will beat, regardless of one's intentions, because it is designed to do so! But such is the pace of life, such are the misplaced priorities, so deep rooted are certain prejudices and gender biases and so busy is one playing out assigned social roles, that it's the heart which has stopped beating and been relegated to mechanical functioning! Emotionally speaking, it has no function to perform! Hence the prayer, dil dharakne do! Nice theme and Zoya Akhtar does a good job with Dil Dharakne Do in weaving an entertaining saga on love at different stages of life.  

             Essentially it's about the swish set, the super rich and good looking Mehras, played by Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah who are successfully orchestrating the image of a happily married couple leading an enviable social life but are actually the architects of a dysfunctional family! It is difficult to imagine that they were once young and romantic enough to elope and get married! The journey of life gives them two great kids, lots of wealth, even more stress but in the process love flies out of the expensive French windows! He goes about with his business and she dresses up to socialise with equally disenchanted lady friends! Many a sigh in the audiences and I knew there was a connect! 

         The Mehras embark on a cruise to celebrate their 30th, with their swashbuckling friend circle in the Bosphorus, covering Turkey and Greece, spending close to 8000 euros per couple. But on that dream cruise, with expensive crockery and cutlery and besides all the grease paint, Louis Vuittons and Cartiers, there is a lot of sadness! 

              The Mehra's daughter is unhappily married and the son just doesn't match up to the high expectations of the father. That he's mamma's boy goes without saying. But the same indulgent Mamma has no empathy for her miserable daughter, caught in a love less marriage, and thinks that marital discord should be fixed by having babies! She connives with her husband to trick her son into a marriage of convenience and that's about the only time one realises how similar the husband n wife are! 

         Priyanka and Ranveer Singh have great "chemistry" as siblings and Rahul Bose is every successful woman's nightmare of a husband! He bombastically gives himself the credit for allowing wifey Priyanka, who is anyway a marginalised member of the Mehra family, to pursue her career! And I thought, these were stupid, middle class issues! Male hegemony, women struggling to find their space, selling their jewellery to fund their careers, having no claim on parental business after marriage; in fact being so irrelevant as to not even find one's name in the RSVP credit for the 30th anniversary card of the parents. At the end of the day women get a raw deal, isn't it, whatever class they belong to! 

The cruise is fun! There's dance, there's drama, there's hypocrisy, theres melancholy, there's deceit, there's conceit, you name it, it's all there! And you have some great actors making all these emotions come alive on the screen, including the sutradhar Pluto! The story is actually his narrative, at least his perception of what his family is all about! Some of his " soliloquies"are quite entertaining! 

For the first time, I found Ranveer actually good! He looks effortlessly rich, dapper yet humane and totally "vela" and steals the thunder from Priyanka and others in some critical scenes. For once, he doesn't look like a Tangewala/rickshawala. His romance with Anoushka is a bit too quick to develop, therefore incredible, but maybe I am old fashioned! 

At the end of the day the movie belongs to Shefali Shah and Anil Kapoor, and in that order! Shefali acts the part of a pretentious socialite, with a hollow where her heart used to be, with great finesse! Being shot in Turkey and having Anoushka as a dancer in the film I half expected there to be a belly dance number, but whatever is the dance form Anoushka practices, it was damn good! Farhan enters the scene after intermission and that's a flaw! He brings the necessary gravitas and realism to the film and should have asked real life sis for more! Any way the audience felt cheated with so little of him! Going by the flavour of the season,maybe Dil Dharakne Do Returns will sort this flaw out! Go enjoy the movie!