“He just wants to fit in and feel light,” a teenage girl tells Sid, the stiff moral anchor of Netflix’s Friday Night Plan. It’s a moment that foregrounds the warm, syrupy heart of a coming-of-age film that refuses to succumb to the notoriety of a genre known for its more rambunctious extremes. There is a party here, a sort of playful rivalry between hormonally charged men, the sight of them wooing both peers and women, and yet the door never quite breaks away from the hinge in the manner that rowdy teenage portrayals mandate. Instead, Friday Night Plan is happy to occupy the edgeless territory that by virtue of being both endless and unremarkable, yields its own nuances about trauma and responsibility. Of course it feels undercooked and slow at times, but there is an innocence here that is worth watching and maybe even preserving.
Babil Khan plays Sid, a gainfully self-aware teenager who seems on the cusp of dull adulthood. Not because he looks or seems that way – Khan much like his late father is anything but bewitching – but because he keeps his hands in his pockets, his fantasies within the orbit of his dutiful worldview. Sid’s younger brother Adi, played by Amrith Jayan, on the other hand wants the fickle glory of popularity and neighbourhood fame. He seeks approval, and to do things that in a strictly mathematical sense define ‘cool’. The brothers bicker, disagree, but rarely do they expound the kind of toxicity or violence that young men can at times embody. Being raised by their widowed mother (Juhi Chawla) both must contemplate their evolving roles as the remaining men of the house.
On the face of it Friday Night Plan is about the makings of a rousing blowout that culminates in unintended jeopardy and life lessons distilled from it. But within that predictable yarn, there are the tresses of moments that stand out. Sid becomes an unlikely hero, by scoring the winning goal for his school’s team. He is reluctantly invited by the alpha males of his school, an invitation he refuses at first. “Tum logon ko drunk aur immature behave karte dekhne se acha toh main apni goofa mein jaun,” he tells his teammates who suspect his introverted ways. Egged by the overeager Adi, he decides to eventually mix with the crowd, even give into some of their more risqué methods of settling harmless quibbles. A minor accident pits the two brothers against a cop – a knotty situation they wriggle free of through sheer earnestness. It’s as cozy as life inside a teenage body almost never is.
Beyond the machinery that pins director Vatsal Neelakantan’s film to a familiar genre, there is this committed resistance to its more salacious outcomes. The rivalries remain chivalrous, the love stories respectful. Even the reconciliations strangely civil and controlled. Nothing spirals out of control, so to speak. It’s fuzzy but also likeable in an obvious way. Though a winning goal sets in motion the events that unlock Sid from the cylindrical shell of concern and guilt he has rolled himself into, it’s really his brother’s toothy nature that sets him free. The fact that neither of the two brothers is framed as a charismatic winner also gives the film the hint of an underdog narrative without presumptively painting the two as losers. Winning and losing, in fact, is as much a matter of chance as it is of opportunity. Opportunity that you can only see after you stop feeling sorry about yourself, the film wants to say. Sometimes courting risk is the only way of doing it.
Not everything works in the film. The urban, upscale milieu often feels at odds with the grounded messaging. There is a constant battle between giving into the slapstick notoriety of the genre and holding onto the temperate grammar of a story that otherwise floats with its hands close to its chest. It neither wants to ruffle any feathers, nor put a dent in the sky. It’s sweet, watchable in a harmlessly infective kind of way. Khan is especially charming as a mindful teenager walking that tightrope between letting go and holding on. A moment in the police station where he misreads a situation, is a lovely little insight into the unpredictable nature of social reading. Some things just cannot be taught.
Friday Night Plan lives up to the drifting gaze of its name by packaging a sweet little coming-of-age story and padding it with likeable, unprovocative men. Intended to charm, as opposed to provoke, this is a portrayal of youth that recuses itself from tokenizing our wildest fantasies about them. Fantasies that are increasingly clocking between misdemeanour and mayhem. Destitution seems to be the lens of the present. Except, maybe most of our teenagers, like Sid and Adi, are still living those unremarkable lives that momentarily light up through minor transgressions of destiny. The fallout from which is low-key lightning, without any thunder. Lightning that is worth watching for everything it tells you about the absence of thunder.
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