Ending of Vicky Kaushal starrer The Great Indian Family explained

“Democracy hai Billu, Naxal matt bano,” a middle-aged uncle, played by Manoj Pahwa, tells his nephew in an emotionally charged sequence from The Great Indian Family. Such warped declarations and buzzwords populate a film that, though brave and coloured in its texture, practically stumbles towards its predictable moment of clarity.

Allegorized to resemble a multi-faceted, multi-cultural country like ours, this film is set in a joint family that though it has a majoritarian look, also sports the shades of contesting outlooks. Or at least it exhibits them in the many ways it urges its characters to hold onto contradictions - the devout can be greedy, the loyal can betray, and the young can defy the tug of technological emancipation. Billed as a battle between the religion that is family and the religion that is society, used interchangeably here, The Great Indian Family doesn’t entertain, as much as it endures. And maybe that’s the point.

Vicky Kaushal plays Bhajan Kumar (Billu), Balrampur’s most popular priest/performer. Kumar has the gift of divinity, something that though rewarding in a societal sense, has robbed him of pleasures of a more notorious nature. Like any other small-town film, Billu is flanked by two friends, who aren’t really given much to do other than dawdle on details and deflect the plot every time it approaches them with urgency or enthusiasm. The main characters here are Billu’s father, played by the terrific Kumud Mishra, and his uncle, played by the dependable Pahwa.

Priesthood is a family business, of which Mishra is the authoritative stamp. Brahminism is keyed into the film’s layers that though it makes the terrain slippery, also expunges it clean of lacerations like casteism. Not everything though can be addressed through a summarizing brushstroke.

The plot of the film feels pockmarked, in contrast to the dopey temperature and texture of the world it is set in. It feels like quirky TikTok video attempting to overnight claw at the depth of a stirring cross-border memoir. Billu learns about a historic secret that flips his life upside-down. He is unanticipatedly thrust into the arms of the very people – Muslims – that he has spent a lifetime chastising and othering. His induction into their culture, is boilerplate material hastened the way only a poorly made biryani would be. From cross-cultural Ramleelas to kohl-eyed countenances, Billu draws knowledge from the depthless instruments of social media. He unlearns by learning which can feel jarring, even silly in an academic sense. But so does the malicious stereotyping of minorities that pervades our cultural economy, like the rumour of an impending collapse.

The biggest problem with this film directed by Vijay Krishna Acharya, is that it can neither mime fun nor does it dramatically extort sympathy, in the way most films with a socio-political agenda do. There is this dulling sense of inevitability about the film’s climax, the tame lecture that most social issue films end with. You could still watch it for the journey, except the preface to that predictable jaunt down morality lane, is rarely entertaining, let alone enchanting. This is the Ayushmann Khurrana school of filmmaking done poorly. Not to say that the performances are poor, or unbecoming of a film that urges us to repeatedly care for it. But there is precious little to enjoy in the goofy bust-ups, the boy-gang dynamics or the unremarkable romance that Billu practically bumps into with a Sikh girl (Manushi Chhillar). It feels flat, jading you into a sense of boredom that no degree of earnestness from Kaushal can cure.

The Great Indian Family, to the director’s credit, is at least provocative by design. Its methods are stubborn and direct. Billu’s family, for example, conducts an actual vote to take important decisions. It’s an artless way of doing things in the cinematic realm, ushering vices to the side with democracy as leverage, and yet the film makes the point that eventually, all conflicts must be resolved on the inside. The body may conform to the visible details of religion and faith, but ultimately it is the heart that assigns it the creed of sociology. Sociology that much like our country, emphasizes indistinctiveness with a difference.

That said, Acharya’s film simply never takes off until it excitedly does. It attentively holds onto its core issues, that courageous as they may be, never quite threaten with anything resembling entertainment. The songs drift, the romantic overtures keel over, as turf battles turn into tepid examinations of our conflicted social fibre. The film’s gaze shifts from friendship to family, from conflict to confusion, so abruptly that it ends up abstracting something that could have maybe used a brush stroke of tenderized realism.

Kaushal & Co. are committed, and enjoyable as characters but beyond the isolative metric of their selective talents, the ensemble is undone by an insipid script. None of it is more evident than in Billu’s frantic shifts between ignorance, provocation and familial perseverance. Which kind of perfectly echoes a film that blows hot and stops cold, often at the most inopportune moments. It’s daring in a uneven, material sense, but cinematically it can’t quite find the glove its bravely raised hand could fit.