The film’s success is in blending teen angst into the glossy format of a ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’. Ibrahim Ali Khan makes a not-bad debut, while Khushi Kapoor really nails her part. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
A few minutes into Nadaaniyaan, I felt this was not going to be my kind of movie. I have nothing against glossy productions with good-looking people, but there was a strain of self-consciousness that kept putting me off: it looked like the film was trying to say “I am a woke version of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai”. Khushi Kapoor, who’s becoming a really confident actor, plays a super-rich schoolgoer named Pia. She acknowledges that she is the poster girl of privilege and entitlement, whose classmates are pampered kids whose therapy bills are greater than their sky-high fees. A break means flying to Europe, and when a friend turns up late, Pia complains that her highlight is losing its glow. Archana Puran Singh appears as the accented principal who gets her slang and acronyms wrong. In her book, WTF means…. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Watching her repeat her OTT (as in, ‘over the top’) attitude from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, I thought this was going to be an OTT (as in, Netflix) update of that earlier movie.
But very quickly, things begin to go very right, thanks primarily to the director Shauna Gautam and the writers Ishita Moitra, Jehan Handa, and Riva Razdan Kapoor, who is credited with the story. In the 1980s, John Hughes made a wonderful bunch of teen movies that depicted the angst of adolescence: films like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Nadaaniyan’s success is that it infuses that sensibility into the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai format, in a way that’s perfect for home viewing. The plot has to do with Pia hiring Arjun (Ibrahim Ali Khan, in a not-bad debut) to pose as her boyfriend. (It has something to do with her friends.) The screenplay is smart enough to question the slight absurdity of this development. Arjun asks Pia, “Yeh kaisi dosti hai?” He wants to know why she can’t just be upfront with her friends, and why she needs all this drama.
But he is too focused and practical a person to get what she is going through. The contrasting arcs are that Arjun is a near-robotic guy, while Pia is an insecure, self-doubting mess, all too human. They balance each other out. He gives her a spine of steel that she never got from her parents. And she gives him a heart. She makes him understand that people are not perfect and that they mess up. Pia knows this all too well, thanks to her parents played by Mahima Chaudhry and Suneil Shetty. Jugal Hansraj and Dia Mirza play Arjun’s parents. The unusual casting adds a lot of flavour, and every character detail is neatly explained. For instance, when we learn that Arjun’s parents are protective to the extent that he feels he needs his own space, no major explanation is needed. Most Indian parents are that way, after all, and many of us have felt like we need our space. But the screenplay adds a small detail about the circumstances of Arjun’s birth, and this adds to the reason these parents are so protective.
Arjun is introduced as a swimming champion, but again, this is no random detail. This is part of a life-plan. Arjun takes money from Pia for acting as her boyfriend. Again, this money is contributing something bigger in his scheme of things. Arjun is so end-goal oriented that he needs someone to educate him that life is about what happens along the way. As for Pia, all she wants is a secure family life. You think that the big conflict will be the reveal that Arjun is Pia’s fake-boyfriend. (The audience knows this, but the other characters in the film don’t.) But again, the screenplay smartly subverts this expectation by giving us another, utterly unexpected big conflict, one that shatters Pia’s life. The emotions are gently teased out from various smaller hints planted earlier. Even the school is humanised, in a manner of speaking. Unlike Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, we don’t just see basketball and lockers and romance. We also see career counseling.
Nadaaniyan tackles many progressive points. From parents still wanting a son to the unfairness of elitism and classism, from what women are expected to choose as their profession to toxic male mindsets, from red-flag relationships in youngsters to an older homemaker rediscovering her career passion – the film has it all. And while one part of me wished they had dug a little deeper and made this more dramatic, another part of me was happy that these issues are touched upon just enough to register, just enough to matter in a two-hour entertainer. Every character gets something of note to do, and every line shapes these characters. At one point, Pia teases Arjun about his backhanded compliment, and later, when he gives her a direct compliment (reflecting his slow change), she teases him about that, too. “Bilkul apne baap pe gaya hai,” says Arjun’s father. The line refers to Saif Ali Khan, as Ibrahim looks exactly like him. But despite these odd self-referential touches, this is not an empty-calorie star-kid launch vehicle.
Towards the end, I wanted to see how Pia and Arjun were going to get back together, given how messy the way they parted was. We get to see his point of view, as well as hers. Both Pia and Arjun stay remarkably consistent to who they are as characters, and every incremental development towards the big climax feels true and feels earned. Nadaaniyan is probably not the kind of film that will work in theatres today, but ten years ago, when the “Juhu-Bandra movies” were doing well, I think it could have been a hit. There’s not much time wasted on lip-sync songs, and this allows the story to push through in a super-organic manner. Even the one big song-and-dance set piece is used meaningfully, to introduce a character we have only heard about so far. At one point, this new character tells Pia, “Badi ho gayi hain aap.” She says, simply, “Hona pada.” She had to begin adulting. Nadaaaniyan makes you feel the teen romance has begun adulting, too.
