I love this movie. Visually and theatrically it’s a stunning epic. The nuances are subtle enough so that for the discerning viewer it’s a cinematographic masterpiece. But for those that need to be more handheld through a story, it may be lacking in diaglogue or explanations as to why the characters feel and act the way they do.
The acting is absolutely superb and critics have remarkably underrated the worth of this movie. The songs, music and choreography is just spectacular and it’s rightly been called a visual feast for all of these reasons and more.
The story is simple yet has layers of emotion and agenda that really provoke thought and contemplation. If you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of each of the characters (which we’re invited to do at the end), you’ll realise the film to be the heartbreaking tragedy that it is. You’ll question the nature of love and the degrees of selfishness that lead to destruction. You’ll question right action and emotional suppression and find no easy answers. Indeed some of the lines in key dialogues between characters merit inner reflection and absorption.
Summary of Plot
Roop (Alia Bhatt), a beautiful young girl full of hope and joy and at the prime of her life, is emotionally blackmailed by her father to enter into a relationship with a wealthy man.
The wealthy man already has a wife, Satya (Sonakshi Sinha). She’s dying of cancer and it is she who approaches Roop asking her to to come and live with them so Roop can be a companion to her husband after her demise. Satya’s own father had once helped Roop’s family financially and now she uses this sense of obligation and offers of more money to convince Roop’s father to send his eldest daughter to them.
Roop is disgusted by the idea but her father points out that as the eldest daughter she has a duty to provide for her younger sisters’ weddings.
Realising that she’s essentially being sold out by her own family and no one has her best interests at heart, Roop has the presence of mind to at least insist on marriage as the wealthy man’s second wife before she goes to live with him.
Things might have not been so bad except her new husband, Dev (Aditya Roy Kapur) takes a particularly cold stance against her. On their wedding night he leaves Roop alone on her own, telling her curtly that he only married her to please his dying wife whom he loves and advising Roop to have no expectations of love or anything else from him. She would be afforded respect in the house and that would be all.
If this wasn’t enough to crush Roop, for extra emphasis he proceeds to essentially ignore her presence from then on in the house and at the office, negating even his promise of basic respect.
Understandably Roop resents the situation she finds herself in and resists the first wife’s attempts to push her towards the hostile husband. She even comes close to suicide at one point in a trance of intense emotional pain.
Her new home’s redemption comes in the form of Hira Mandi, a notorious part of the town where she gains permission to have singing lessons from a famous courtesan Bahaar Begum (Madhuri Dixit).
There she meets charismatic Zafar (Varun Dhawan), a local romeo, who starts to romance her from the moment of first meeting. Their worlds irrevocably intertwine when they rapidly discover how much they have in common - both are unwanted misfits betrayed in love by parents and feel alone with nothing to lose in the world.
If that were all, it would be bad enough for the star-crossed lovers. But we discover that Zafar has his own painful connections with Roop’s in-laws that complicate the situation even further.
All of this unfolds with Partition looming in the background. Dev, a Hindu, runs the leading newspaper company in the region and stubbornly takes an anti-partition stance even at the cost of alienating his Muslim neighbours and inviting their wrath.
When things come to a head both in the love story and the political scene, the lives of everyone involved become seriously endangered...