Rahul Desai
It felt like we were finally watching a behind-closed-doors edition of all those obscenely wealthy and dysfunctional north Indian families that once defined our infatuation with post-liberalization Bollywood.
The film’s heartbreaking silences and muted complexity discloses Akhtar as an arthouse entertainer ensconced within a mass thinker. Despite being ripe with social subtext the film doesn’t flaunt its commentary. It trusts the viewer to find what applies to them.
It uses the inherent fictions of wealth and social status – cleverly manifested by the Delhi wedding-planning business – to explore the fragile realities of human relationships.
This is essentially an Artist's Story, which is why so much truth bleeds between film-maker and frames, between music and words, between fiction and feeling.
Is there a fuller Bollywood movie about Bollywood? Akhtar’s first remains her finest and most perceptive film. It’s not surprising, because it is also perhaps her most personal, given her creative lineage. Its gaze is infectious, insightful, complex, and, at times, wickedly entertaining.