Nupur Agrawal
After a long wait (considering how much I was waiting for this one) and too many opinions thanks to the super fast media channels these days, I finally managed to catch a night show of Dear Zindagi.
Coming back to the plot of the movie. So what does a woman want ? Mel Gibson couldn’t put a finger on it in his famous rom-com so let’s rephrase the question. What does a person want at the age of 25 when they have their dream job, amazing friends and a lovely house in Mumbai ? Enter Kiara (Alia Bhatt) – A successful cinematographer, who doesn’t want to stop at a well-paid job and assisting in cinematography but wants to shoot her own movie. She owns an uber-cool house in Mumbai, is a man magnet, has great friends who love her for who she is, but there is a little problem there, she doesn’t love herself. And perhaps that’s the reason why she pushes away everyone who comes close to loving her a little too much. But why ? Why is self-love so difficult ? Why is she so complicated ? Thank god her landlord pushes her out of her house and she has no option but to go back to her home town – Goa.
A dream vacation and yearly dose of energy for many, Goa is a living hell for Kiara. Surprised much ? Well Goa is her home town and she hates it. But this is the thing about destiny, sometimes the exact thing that you are running from, contains the answers to all your questions.
Enter King Khan aka Dr. Jehangir Khan, a jaana maana psychologist and he is cool because he wears ripped jeans to formal events. He compels Kiara to take her first brave step – Accept that she needs help.
He interprets her dreams, gives her little life lessons which are a bit too gyaani at times but I didn’t mind that as I took note of a few and makes her meet her insecurities and the real dark reasons behind them and eventually nipping them at the bud. And gradually, it’s not his therapy or her innocence, but the special relationship and a rare bond that develops between them which sets the movie apart from the rest.
Dr. Khan stays the second fiddle and his share of feelings is unsaid and unrevealed till the last scene that was strikingly similar to the last scene of Chak De India, when he falls back on the creaking chair, and his face says it all.
Shahrukh is charming as Jehangir Khan as he fits into the role extremely well and Alia Bhatt takes away the thunder with another intense performance. Apart from the title track, I simply love the Ali Zafar version of ‘Tu Hi Hai’ and his musical character in the movie was adorable and sexy 😀 It was the name of Gauri Shinde that drove me to watch this film as she did a great job with English Vinglish, and she once again touched a rarely touched subject and treated it with respect.
This film is not about finding an incredible psychologist who comes with a magical therapy to cure you, it’s simply about being surrounded by a world full of people who love you and want to pull you out of a crisis, but the quest of finding that one single person who finally does the job and does it bloody well.
