‘We Are Family’ Makes You Cry For The Wrong Reasons

Director: Siddharth Malhotra
Cast: Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Here’s the good news: we finally have a Bollywood film that acknowledges its source material. Chris Columbus’s Stepmom was a tearjerker in which a cancer-afflicted Susan Sarandon grooms her ex-husband’s girlfriend, Julia Roberts, to be her replacement. The “official” Bollywood remake of that film is We Are Family and it also had us in tears. Mostly because we were feeling sorry for ourselves, Arjun Rampal, Elvis Presley and the poor girl playing Rampal’s eldest daughter at the end of the movie (she has to pretend Kareena Kapoor is her mother even though Kapoor looks about ten years younger than her).

Aman (Rampal) and Maya (Kajol) are the divorced parents of three children being raised by Maya. When Aman introduces his girlfriend Shreya (Kapoor) to Maya and the kids, some hell breaks loose. Maya insists Shreya is immature. Then she learns she has only a few months to live, and invites Shreya to stay with her, the kids and Aman (who moved back in with her after he learnt of her condition).

Rampal has one thing to do in the film: enter the room carrying a bag because he’s either on his way in or out from a shoot since he’s a photographer. Most of the time, he looks embarrassed to be in the scene and we don’t blame him. In fact, at the end of the movie, when he appears wearing an obviously-false beard, we think he stuck it on hoping no one would recognise him. But the film isn’t about him. It’s about Kajol and Kapoor and they manage to extract what they can from the script. Although much of Stepmom has been retained, the changes that producer Karan Johar and director Siddharth Malhotra have introduced weaken We Are Family considerably. For instance, Roberts played a photographer in Stepmom and her job tied in with the plot. Shreya is a designer and we defy anyone to take her seriously as a professional. Presumably to make time for nonsense like the desi version of “Jailhouse Rock”, the children are less rounded as characters and get far less fun dialogues than their Hollywood counterparts. We’re also not sure why Kajol has to be mother of three while Sarandon could get away with raising only two. Slacker. The tour de force of bad filmmaking is the film’s last sequence—the aforementioned daughter’s wedding—a pure Bollywood creation, unaided by any Hollywood inspiration.

Most disturbing are Johar ‘s and Malhotra’s ideas of parenthood. Being a mother, or the “mom-type formula” as Kajol puts it, is coded into the female DNA apparently. The daughters’ reaction to their father having a girlfriend is repeatedly telling her “Woh mere papa hain!” (“He’s my daddy!”) as if “papa” is equal to “boyfriend”. This might work for Woody Allen but we’re not sure families in general should be this close.

Deepanjana Pal is a journalist and the author of The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma. She is currently developing a keen appreciation for lazy brunches and coffee breaks in Bandra while working on her freelance assignments.