“Dear Zindagi”: A Love Letter to Life
Depicting mental health both realistically and in a way that contains universality for large audiences is difficult. Most films usually confine themselves to showing characters with extremely specific illnesses that not everyone can identify with. Or worse, some films adopt a self-righteous “on-message” tone so that the audiences are subjected to a preachy lecture on the importance of mental health. Rarely does one come across a film in which mental health is treated with the sensitivity and understanding it requires. This is unsurprising as the trickiness of translating the struggles of mental health onto the big screen arises from the fact that each individual’s experience with mental health is different. And so without meaning to, most films are unable to cross the barrier of normalizing mental health and the issues revolving around it. To deepen the difficulty, in real life there are strong, complex socio-cultural forces that obstruct discussing mental health issues as something that anyone might face and so most films are hindered by the same forces. So imagine my surprise and delight at finding a film that not only is able to cross this barrier, but actually is an extremely enjoyable film to watch, blending humor and sensitivity to convey the complexities present within the human mind. “Dear Zindagi” as in “Dear Life,” is a Hindi-language film whose title befits its spirit and its intention to serve as a love letter to life.
Every scene, nay, every frame of the film is done so beautifully and artfully that as an audience, we feel enveloped in the warm embrace of a mother or mentor whose loving caresses guide us on a journey. This isn’t to say that the film isn’t about serious issues. Its entire storyline is centered on a troubled young woman called Kaira living in Mumbai where she works as a cinematographer. Kaira, played to perfection by a young Alia Bhatt, has turbulent mood swings, shuts out all those who wish to get close to her romantically as she’s too afraid to show her true feelings, and refuses to answer her parents’ phone calls from their home in Goa. She has a group of young, colorful friends, also part of the Mumbai film scene, that she loves to death. Yet even from them, at times she hides her most painful experiences and her innermost feelings by having a tough and surly exterior. However, soon the exterior cracks when her personal issues start affecting her professional life and when Mumbai’s hard metropolitan life starts to seem like the punchline of a cruel joke on Kaira as she’s evicted from her flat for the sexist reason (that sadly is still prevalent in several places) of her living alone unmarried. This downward spiral of events for the jaded and unhappy Kaira culminates in her moving disdainfully back to Goa which she hates as she is forced to live with her parents. Gauri Shinde, the director, shows this downward trajectory extremely tastefully so that its realism and believability cannot be doubted. We see one major event become the catalyst of several aspects of Kaira’s life going wrong or at least that is how she sees it. Shots of her sleep-deprived face as she develops insomnia during a particularly sad and angry sequence show with extreme poignancy the darkness closing in on her. Through Shinde’s masterful touch, we see most things entirely from Kaira’s emotional perspective and it helps make her struggles seem like our struggles. Everyone at some point in their life has hit an all-time low and this low is what the film captures fearlessly in all its messiness and unpleasantness so that one is left not feeling as if the film has taken liberties or violated the sanctity of the personal, but rather that it has illuminated with empathy the lows that inevitably exist in a person’s life. So when Kaira decides to go to a therapist to cure her insomnia, it leads to a natural storyline that subtly de-stigmatises mental health in a way that’s rarely been done in Indian cinema, or cinema at large for that matter.
What Alia Bhatt does as she inhabits a character like Kaira is a tour de force. She plays the many facets of Kaira with ease and subtlety. Her addiction to partying, shopping online and losing herself, her visceral, untouched pain that slowly seethes beneath the surface in every scene she’s in and her creativity as a headstrong cinematographer are all played simultaneously by Bhatt so that a fully-fledged character appears in front of us. She feels throughout the film like a person of flesh and blood, bursting out of the screen. Bhatt’s performance is even more elegant and effective because of the brilliant screenplay she is supported by. The screenplay doesn’t throw jargon about mental health around and it doesn’t poke fun at Freudian theories or the psychologist that Kaira starts seeing. Instead, in a jaw-dropping move, it makes the psychologist himself (played by Shah Rukh Khan) funny.
Of course, the film doesn’t confine itself to what a traditional therapy session looks like in real life. Rukh’s character,Jug, is personal, slightly wild as he takes Kaira to the beach or to a boat and uses hilarious metaphors to help her work through her issues. Shinde’s inclusion of such a character shows her commitment not necessarily to the factual realism of what therapy sessions are like but rather her commitment to the real ways they can help make a person look at things differently. And such a commitment is worth applauding because it does away with the technicalities of what mental health issues and treatment are to what they may feel like for the individual – something that anyone can relate to or empathize with. In one particularly amusing scene for instance, when Kaira is conflicted about whether to give up her dream job because her ex and his fiance are working on it, Jug tells an extremely long-winded, absurd story about a man being eaten by a tiger. While we, the audience, are sent into fits of giggles, the point of his story is not lost as he concludes with the idea that we sometimes put too much stress on ourselves to our detriment simply because we think the more difficult path is the more important one. His gentle message that we can take the easy path—an idea that goes against every teaching ingrained into us since childhood by modern societal ideals such as “taking the road less traveled-by” —is eye-opening precisely because of its simplicity. Very few films are so masterful that they can normalize personal issues of a character so that the solution seems applicable for those who are watching the film as well.
In a world where films are often considered bold or daring if they seek complicated storylines and messages, “Dear Zindagi”stands out for its simple message. While it embraces all the grayness in its characters and the complexities surrounding mental health, its humor, wit and simple wisdom make it great and worthy of joining the small echelon of extraordinary films. Its heartfelt song-sequence about loving life that plays as Kaira becomes happier has so much genuineness shining through it that it doesn't feel preachy or trite for even a single second. And the one characteristic that distinguishes it from all other films on similar topics is that it treats its characters with the dignity and understanding they deserve. It very realistically shows Kaira having romantic feelings for a therapist who she feels seen by and who’s responsible for her growth and happiness. But her feelings are sensitively handled as this is a common symptom in those who seek therapy and the film acknowledges such feelings directly. The film also doesn’t try to romanticize her story as Jug gently explains to her that he will always be her therapist only and that she cannot see him after their sessions are over. Her pain is shown with touching poignancy and delicacy as is her progress mentally so that she’s not destroyed by another relationship ending. Bhatt is truly phenomenal in the last few emotional sequences of the film. She plays Kaira’s anger and deep-rooted pain at her parents for abandoning her as a child, her increased attraction to Jung's view of looking at things and her eventual sense of peace within the span of just a few minutes that shows her wide, emotional range as an actor.
And so for Bhatt’s performance, for the original screenplay and its outrageous humor, I deem “Dear Zindagi” to be a brilliant, bold and beautiful film. It's the sort of film one must see once in their life. While the language and scenes may be Indian, the film’s ubiquity is unparalleled. It is not just a film about mental illness. It's about a myriad of different things that exist in life—relationships, pain, friendships, etc. And above all it's about loving life in all its complexities and simplicities.