We Are Family Movie Review: Film: ‘We Are Family’; Cast: Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal; Directed by: Siddharth Malhotra; Rating: ****
Some films are good to look at. Some feel good at heart. Very few mainstream films manage to look as good on the surface and also capture the heart. ‘We Are Family’ is equally appealing from the outside and at the heart.
It doesn’t take us long into the narration to realize that the debutant director has his own ideas on how urban man-woman relationships work. Siddharth Malhotra brings the traditional compassion and large-heartedness of Sooraj Barjatya’s films into the same line of vision as the urban fables about the man-woman relationship of Gulzar’s ‘Ijaazat’ and Govind Nihalani’s ‘Drishti’. The brew is invigorating and often very very moving in the way movies stopped moving us a long time ago.
The basic premise and even chunks of sequences and dialogues are taken from Chris Columbus’ ‘Stepmom’. Are Kajol and Kareena Kapoor as powerful in portraying the wife and the other woman as Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in the original?
What if one says the two divas in the desi ‘Stepmom’ are far more empathetic in their understanding of the complexities of a marriage that has not quite terminated and the alternative relationship which doesn’t know where to go without disrespecting the earlier relationship? Kajol and Kareena share a compelling partnership in portraying a household that’s run by two women.