Kapoor & Sons

Shakun Batra's second feature arrived in March 2016 with a marketing campaign built around a family photograph and a title card that read "Since 1921." The film itself is less interested in lineage than in the accumulated damage of ninety-five years of Kapoors not saying what they mean. Rishi Kapoor, in his final screen role, plays the 90-year-old patriarch Amarjeet, whose health is failing and whose single remaining ambition is to gather everyone for a proper portrait. Getting them into the frame proves harder than anyone expects.

Dharma Productions and Fox Star Studios backed the film at a reported cost of about $3.58 million. It returned roughly $17.41 million worldwide, a multiple that made it one of the year's more efficient Hindi releases. Batra shot much of it on location in Coonoor, in the Nilgiris, and the hill town's damp, enclosed atmosphere does as much narrative work as the dialogue. Jeffery F. Bierman handled the cinematography; the score and songs were divided among Amaal Mallik, Tanishk Bagchi, Arko Pravo Mukherjee, Nucleya and Badshah.

The ensemble includes Ratna Pathak Shah and Rajat Kapoor as the parents, Fawad Khan and Sidharth Malhotra as the estranged brothers, and Alia Bhatt as the woman who becomes a point of friction between them. What distinguished the film at the time, and what has kept it in circulation since, is its willingness to let a mainstream Hindi family drama sit with a gay character's interior life without turning that character into a lesson. Batra has said since that he doubts the same film could be made now. [edit]

A prologue set in Coonoor in 1921 establishes the Kapoor family's long residence in the Nilgiri hill town before the film moves to the present. Amarjeet Kapoor, known to everyone as Dadu, is ninety, frail, and repeatedly hospitalised. His recurring request is modest: he wants a family photograph, captioned "Kapoor & Sons, Since 1921." That wish is the mechanism that draws the scattered family back under one roof.

The house is managed by his daughter-in-law Sunita, played by Ratna Pathak Shah, who carries the caretaking load while her husband Harsh, played by Rajat Kapoor, nurses a long list of professional and personal failures. Their marriage has settled into a rhythm of bickering that has hardened into ritual. The film treats this as the house's ambient weather rather than a single event with a beginning and an end.

Their two adult sons arrive from abroad. Arjun, the younger, played by Sidharth Malhotra, is a struggling writer who has spent years overseas trying to outrun his family's expectations and his own sense of being the unfavoured child. He is broke, defensive, and quick to read insult into ordinary remarks. Rahul, the elder, played by Fawad Khan, is the polished and successful one: the son who calls, the son who sends money, the son the family holds up as the example. His composure is so complete that it reads as armour. The brothers love each other and cannot share a room without the old ledger of comparisons opening up.

Tia, played by Alia Bhatt, lives nearby and becomes a spark of possible romance. Because both brothers are drawn to her, she also becomes a fresh fault line. The film keeps this triangle light on its feet rather than melodramatic. Much of the first half plays as sitcom-bright banter: ensemble squabbling, a chaotic birthday party, a running gag about Dadu's morbid jokes and his fixation on the photograph, and the comic friction of relatives orbiting the house, among them Anahita Oberoi as Neetu Chachi and Vikram Kapadia as Shashi Chacha.

Underneath the comedy the film builds pressure. Arjun's resentment of Rahul sharpens as he learns details about his brother's life that the family has kept from him. Harsh's bitterness finds targets. Sunita's exhaustion turns to open fury. Rahul carries a private truth about his own life that he cannot bring himself to share with a family that would not know how to receive it, and the film approaches that secret with unusual restraint for mainstream Hindi cinema of the period. The central conflict is not the love triangle. It is whether a family this practised at not saying things can survive being honest.

The main beats push toward that question: the birthday gathering, a disastrous attempt at the family portrait, escalating confrontations between the brothers and between the parents, and a medical crisis around Dadu. Whether the Kapoors can take the picture he keeps asking for, literally and otherwise, is left open here.[edit]