Clearing the doubts first, this cannot be considered as a Shah Rukh Khan film to be honest as he has just two scenes before the intermission and then makes an extended cameo kind of appearance in the second half providing the much needed support. Playing a psychiatrist, he decently performs his assigned role (except a few hamming scenes) but the film entirely belongs to Alia Bhatt, who once again proves the fact that she is far ahead than her contemporaries when it comes to portray such difficult roles.
However what sadly doesn’t compliment the two lead performers is the film itself with a tediously repetitive writing, a surprisingly boring execution, uninspiring preaching, over the top supporting acts and lackluster music, unnecessarily promoting the film with two poor versions of an immortal cult song without any purpose as such.
In addition, where Alia strongly reminds you of her much superior performance in Imtiaz Ali’s HIGHWAY, writer-director Gauri Shinde also keeps trying to be in Imtiaz Ali’s shoes throughout, delivering an immature and wannabe kind of film shattering the big expectations. With a much appreciable film like ENGLISH VINGLISH to her credit, I personally didn’t expect her to imitate Imtiaz in such a hushed up and unripe manner. In fact DEAR ZINDAGI clearly reveals the huge difference in both the ‘vision & execution’ as where Imtiaz extracted a brilliant performance from Alia in a similar role in his HIGHWAY, Shinde simply fails to create any magic directing the same energetic girl even when she tries to deliver an earnest and highly spirited, sparkling performance to her level best.
With the writing proving as the biggest culprit once again, Alia doesn’t get any major help from her rest of the cast too with only Yashaswani & Ira Dubey coming up with their marginally noticeable acts. Otherwise the actors playing the family members remain far away from being natural (to the extent of irritating) and both Kunal Kapoor and Ali Zafar get nothing much to do in their few scenes. Frankly Ali Zafar’s songs with some catchy phrases turn out to be the only thing to be appreciated among these unimportant cameos.
In reality the main problem with DEAR ZINDAGI is that despite talking about everything right accompanied by a superfine leading act, it still fails to reach your heart like a technically well phrased poem without any touching and emotional soul. The writer-director remains confused throughout and so does her characters who keep contradicting themselves with each new story development. And I really cannot understand why ‘breakup’ is becoming the latest focus of Hindi film directors instead of the eternal love.
For instance, at one end Alia portrays herself as a confident free soul with no emotional baggage, but on the other she quickly gets serious with the same person with whom she had slept having a casual one night stand. Moreover, even after getting treated by a psychiatrist, she still acts the same meeting a new charming man complimenting her in the finale sequence, refusing to learn from her earlier experiences of life behaving like a kid. Besides falling back to the same old clichéd twist, she even falls for her charming doctor too which was the most predictable insertion amongst all, not really expected from the talented director of ENGLISH VINGLISH.
As per my personal opinion, Shinde surely wanted to make a thought provoking film following the footsteps of Imtiaz Ali close to his HIGHWAY and TAMASHA. But at the same time didn’t wish to make it too heavy for the viewers, directing it with a clearly visible dilemma in many key sequences. As a result, a tiringly long DEAR ZINDAGI keeps hanging in the mid and delivers nothing close to what was being expected from the director and the unusual pairing of Shah Rukh and Alia. Moreover the last badly shot short film shown in the end truly didn’t look like anything related to a Gauri Shinde film at all.
The soundtrack once again has the same old issue featuring some fine lyrics but unappealing compositions and renditions not up to the mark. And it was really strange to find that Shinde recorded two lousy versions of the cult song 'Aye Zindagi Gale Laga Le’ too when she had no intentions to use it within the film itself. Perhaps it was only done to grab some instant attention in the media making an awful noise.
In the technical department, both cinematography and background score fail to catch any attention amongst the boring progression and I found the Censors posing as a funny incapable teacher too muting out the word ‘slut’, when almost everyone in theatre could easily make out what was being spoken in the gaps.
In all DEAR ZINDAGI is an overstretched, highly disappointing film from the director of ENGLISH VINGLISH which can only be seen for Alia alone and nothing else.
Rating : 2 / 5
Interestingly Demonetization in the country forced the multiplexes to lower their prices in the last two weeks, which they again shamefully increased with the release of DEAR ZINDAGI this Friday. But neither the stars nor the makers along with the public seem to be concerned over this visible loot being made by the multiplex mafia.
Anyway the film still deserves ‘a minus one’ for the unrequired, awful versions of the cult Illayaraja song “Aye Zindagi Gale Laga Le”, when the makers could have easily used the original avoiding the pathetic damage.
Final Ratings : 2-1 = 1 / 5
(Post Release it was reported that the entire theme and characters of the film had some big similarities with Canadian TV Series BEING ERICA)
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