Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
Synopsis:
Halfway through the film, Farhan Akhtar is casually standing in the middle of a Costa Brava roadside, wearing this terribly patterned button-down shirt that looks like it came from a very confused thrift store, and he's just staring down a massive, furious bull that's charging right at him while the music swells and everybody's losing their minds. But to understand why these three grown men are standing in a field in Spain provoking livestock, you have to look at how this whole trip started, which goes back to Kabir, played by Abhay Deol, proposing to his extremely high-strung girlfriend Natasha, played by Kalki Koechlin, and then getting his friends together for a bachelor road trip across Europe where they made a pact that each guy has to pick an extreme sport and the other two just have to do it.
So then we get introduced to the rest of the crew, starting with Hrithik Roshan's character, who is this ridiculously uptight corporate workaholic glued to his phone and constantly calculating his net worth, and he refuses to take his vacation days off until his buddies basically force him into the car, and then there's Farhan's character, who is this wisecracking advertising writer who secretly carries around ashes in a Tupperware container and writes poetry when nobody's looking. They all pile into this rented SUV and start driving around Spain, blasting music and arguing about stupid things, and the whole dynamic feels like a proper road trip you'd take with your actual college buddies where you're constantly poking fun at each other's childhood traumas and relationship issues. There's this one extremely specific scene where they stop at a roadside diner and Hrithik's character is wearing these wire-rimmed sunglasses and a very boring beige zip-up jacket, and he spends about four straight minutes meticulously organizing his tiny packets of sugar and sweetener into little parallel lines on the greasy wooden table while Natasha calls him on the phone and nags him about venue decorations for the upcoming wedding, and he just stares blankly at the sugar packets and mutters that he can't hear her because of a tunnel, which is a lie because they're out in the open desert, and then he hangs up and goes right back to organizing his condiments.
Anyway, they reach the coast for Kabir's chosen adventure, which turns out to be scuba diving, and this is a massive turning point for Hrithik because he has this paralyzing childhood fear of deep water and refuses to get in the ocean until Katrina Kaif's character, this impossibly gorgeous diving instructor named Laila, basically bullies him into facing his demons by telling him to seize the day, and they go under the water and he has a massive panic attack and cries through his regulator, but once he makes it back to the surface he suddenly realizes that he's been living his entire life completely dead inside. Right after that, they go skydiving, and Farhan's character conquers his vertigo while screaming at the top of his lungs, and they're all just hugging and crying on the tarmac like absolute babies. Seize the day. That's the whole vibe of the project, really.
The funny thing is that this is supposed to be a fun bachelor trip, but it quickly turns into an emotional therapy session where secrets start spilling out everywhere, especially when they find out that Farhan's character is actually in Spain to track down his biological father, an aging artist living in a rustic coastal town who abandoned him years ago, and when they finally track the guy down, it's this incredibly awkward afternoon where the father is painting in a cluttered studio and offers them tea, and Farhan has to confront him about why he never cared, but he handles it with this heartbreaking mix of humor and quiet pain that catches everyone off guard. Things get even messier when Laila chases Hrithik down on a motorcycle after he tries to quietly leave town, and she basically forces him to pull over and declares her love for him right there on the Spanish highway, and he finally drops his corporate armor and kisses her in the middle of the road.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is basically the gold standard for how to make a buddy road trip movie in bollywood, standing tall among modern hindi movies because it actually lets its characters be messy and vulnerable without turning into a cheesy soap opera, which is rare for bollywood movies that usually rely on over-the-top melodrama. Hrithik, Farhan, and Abhay have this totally effortless chemistry that makes you believe they've been best friends since childhood, joking around and insulting each other's mothers with the kind of casual cruelty only true friends can get away with, and even though some of the rich-guy backpacking tropes are a little ridiculous, the sheer beauty of the cinematography makes you want to pack your bags and book a flight to Spain immediately. They finally reach the festival of the bulls in Pamplona, which leads back to that chaotic moment in the dusty field where they are running for their lives, and surviving that terrifying experience changes them so deeply that Kabir actually decides to call off his wedding to Natasha because he realizes he's rushing into a life he doesn't even want, choosing instead to stay single and figure out who he actually is.
The three friends stand together on a cobblestone street at sunset, tossing a small red tomato at each other with huge grins on their faces, and then they slowly start running away from the advancing mob of people in the La Tomatina festival.
Farhan Akhtar drops an 'f' bomb halfway through a conversation about sea urchins and the whole theater kind of shifted in their seats because nobody talks like that in mainstream Hindi films, not really, or at least they didn't in 2011. You sit there waiting for the moral pivot, the scolding auntie, the mandatory family intervention that usually ruins these things, but it just stays breezy and slightly obnoxious in the way wealthy men are when they have too much time and an inheritance waiting back home. I saw it on a Tuesday afternoon at a multiplex that smelled like stale butter and floor cleaner, and half the row was checking their phones during the endless driving sequences through Andalusia, which if I'm honest, felt fair because some of those drone shots of Spanish highways go on about four beats longer than any human eye actually requires to register that Spain is sunny.
Zoya Akhtar directs with a remarkably light hand that occasionally slips into the territory of a glossy tourist board pamphlet paid for by the ministry of culture, though she mostly saves herself by letting her actors actually interrupt one another instead of waiting politely for their cue cards to drop. The script, co-written by Reema Kagti and her brother Farhan, manages to dodge the traditional melodramatic trap where every dropped teacup means a childhood trauma, substituting instead a casual, passive-aggressive banter that feels remarkably like how actual forty-year-old men who went to the same boarding school behave when they are trapped in a car together with no wi-fi. There is a sequence where Abhay Deol's character Kabir drops a casual bombshell about his engagement over breakfast while everyone else is eating eggs, and the camera just stays still on his face, refusing to cut to the expected reaction shots of shock or horror, which gives the moment a weird, flat, stinging authenticity that stays with you long after the slicker action set pieces have faded from memory.
Hrithik Roshan plays Arjun, a Wall Street broker who treats his spreadsheet like a deity and refuses to take off his suit jacket even when they are standing by a swimming pool in Costa Brava, doing that intense, jaw-clenching thing with his facial muscles that reminds you of his work in Lakshya, only here he is richer and considerably more neurotic about his retirement fund. When he finally breaks down and weeps on a beach after a skydiving mishap, his face crumbles in a way that feels uncomfortably real for a movie star whose physical appearance is usually maintained with the strict precision of a Swiss clock, though his constant refrain about working to live rather than living to work starts to sound like a LinkedIn post read aloud by a personal trainer by the final reel. Abhay Deol drifts through the background with a sleepy, amused detachment that makes him look like he wandered off the set of Dev.D and accidentally ended up in a luxury travel commercial, providing a necessary anchor of calm whenever Hrithik's intensity threatens to turn the road trip into an emotional seminar.
Farhan Akhtar steals the picture anyway because he has the best lines and the easiest rhythm, playing Imraan with a scruffy, joke-cracking confidence that masks a desperate search for his biological father, a plot thread that feels pasted in from a completely different and much heavier script. Katrina Kaif shows up as Laila, a free-spirited diving instructor who lives in a van and talks about living in the moment with the kind of unearned serenity that only exists in screenplays written by people who have never had to worry about dental insurance, and yet she works opposite Roshan with a strange, magnetic friction that makes their budding romance plausible despite the heavy lifting required by the dialogue. Kalki Koechlin plays Natasha as a shrieking caricature of bridezilla anxiety, trapped in a role that gives her nothing to do except wave her arms and demand attention, which is a waste of an actor who usually brings a lot more salt to her supporting turns.
Carlos Catalan’s cinematography relies heavily on golden hour lighting and saturated blues that make every single frame look like it was scrubbed clean by an expensive software plugin, which gets tiring after two hours of uninterrupted gorgeousness where even the dirt on the cars looks artfully arranged. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy provide a soundtrack that you couldn't escape for six months after the release, though listening to "Senorita" on the radio now brings back that specific early-decade weariness of multiplex lobbies and endless ringtone advertisements. It’s a road movie that owes a massive debt to things like Y Tu Mama Tambien, minus the political grit and the sticky heat, trading those sharp edges for a sanitized, upper-middle-class fantasy of self-discovery where the worst thing that happens to you is a mild panic attack during a bull run.
There is a recurring visual motif involving deep-sea diving, skydiving, and running with bulls that is supposed to represent confronting one's mortality, but mostly it just feels like an expensive bucket list compiled by people who have watched too many TED talks, yet the film works precisely because it doesn't pretend to be about anything larger than male friendship and the luxury of taking a three-week vacation without checking your inbox. Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to capture the elusive cool of contemporary urban youth without looking like middle-aged screenwriters trying to guess what teenagers say on Twitter, and this picture succeeds not by being revolutionary, but by being just slightly more articulate than the people who buy tickets to see it.
The pacing sags significantly in the middle third when the narrative stops for a prolonged poetry-recitation montage that feels like a vanity project for Javed Akhtar's verse, and I could have happily lived without the third or fourth reprise of the road trip acoustic guitar strumming in the background every time someone looks contemplatively out a window at a mountain range. It is an uneven, occasionally irritating piece of work that sells a very specific, high-end lifestyle as a cure for existential dread, but when the three of them finally drive off into the sunset toward an uncertain future with no luggage left to lose, you might find yourself forgiving its more egregious bourgeois blind spots simply because the company was decent for two and a half hours.