If those conveyor-belt, Hallmark-card-coded Christmas romcoms on Netflix starring versions of Lindsay Lohan are anything to go by every year, it’s normal to be wary of their Indian festive counterparts: the Cadbury-advert-coded Diwali family movie. Last week it was Meethe Mein Kya Hai; this week, it’s the 61-minute-long terribly-tiny-feature Dilwali Diwali. Both minor-key and glossy, both in and around ancestral houses, both sweeter than sugar — and both surprisingly disarming. These are the sort of streaming productions that used to be skit-like YouTube featurettes: a little bit of heart and soul posing as content.
Dilwali Diwali packs quite a bit into its short running time, offering more than just box-of-chocolates resolutions and curated big-happy-fam vibes. It invites the viewer in with a playful premise, quietly undoes a few genre tropes, calls itself out, and manages to offer each character the dignity of agency. It’s one thing to be a light-weight crowd pleaser; it’s another to explore worthy themes of displacement and success and belonging within the sentimentality of this template. It could have been either harmless or heightened, but it settles for a middle ground that humanises the concept of community.
It opens with what looks like a neat little gimmick: a middle-class Punjabi couple, Sudhir (Manoj Pahwa) and Sukhi Sikka (Neelu Kohli), scrambles to ‘prepare’ for the visit of their Norway-based son Ansh (Mihir Ahuja). Except it’s not as simple as decking up the house. Along with their 13-year-old daughter Mahi (Aurra Bhatnagar Badoni), they pack their bags, quickly exit their bustling locality where everyone knows everyone, and pretend to reside in the upscale apartment that Ansh bought for them. It’s a routine, apparently: when he video-calls every Saturday, they make sure he sees them in the swanky flat. The conceit is that it has been empty for months; they haven’t had the heart to tell Ansh that they prefer living back in their rickety old place, around friends and neighbours and people they’ve known for decades. They keep up the act when he arrives, but it gets trickier once he plans to throw a lavish Diwali party.
Most movies would’ve milked this switch-a-roo as a comic device. But this one prefers to confront the uncomfortable relationship between guilt and ambition. Ansh is almost on a mission to show his parents and sister how easy he’s made their life; it’s his first visit in three years, but he sees the notion of togetherness through the lens of sacrifice and selflessness. The context of the story is important. In the few flashbacks of his childhood, it’s revealed that their old neighbourhood is actually the partition refugee camp in the city; their ancestors came from Rawalpindi and turned the modest room into a multi-generational home.
While the elders are historically bound, Ansh got tired of watching his friends leave the camp after social upgrades. It explains his desire to move forward, regardless of whether they can afford it. It’s the aspirational future he wished for, so he imposes his ideas of progress onto a clan that’s averse to change and uprootment. The partition is mentioned only once, but the symbolism is all over the images of them with suitcases shuffling into an ‘alien’ country of sorts. They’re leaving something behind every time they enter the modern township.
One of the merits is the balanced mindspace of the film. When you see the couple trying to ‘adjust’ in this upper-class and automated environment, the residents are snooty and the high-rise is impersonal. It’s a way of reminding viewers of the warmth and familiarity of the camp area without showing it. But the writing doesn’t villainise this posher strata of society; both sides are given the chance to breathe. Sukhi, for example, begins to get along with a neighbour who alters the way she thinks about herself. These parts are executed with on-the-nose dialogue, of course, but the intent outweighs the treatment. It stops short of becoming a TVF Gullak episode with an annoying voice-over that mansplains the meaning of tight-knit units, the mundanity of memories, and the intangible price of love. The cast does the job without resorting to melodrama or dialing up the class chasm; they straddle the line between romanticising the old and fighting the new, between staying and transitioning.
I also like that Dilwali Diwali chooses to challenge the plurality of the conventional family unit. The affections of their problem do not distract from the deep-rooted undercurrents of patriarchy in such setups. Sudhir merely assumes that everyone else wants what he does because he’s the head, just as his son presumes that his family will be grateful for his aggressive care. But both the men are just being men with main-character energies, ‘competing’ to be right while the women in the family wait to be seen and heard. Even the camera reflects this gaze with how Mahi, for example, exists more as an onlooker in the background of most scenes. The tiny details emerge later: like why the father is so liberal with his daughter, or why the mother advises her son to stop chasing success so obsessively.
The screenplay does something radical in how it refuses to place everyone on the same page during the dispute — it’s not Ansh versus the rest, it’s everyone versus themselves. Their individualism is allowed to come to the fore; a difference of opinion is reframed as a healthy problem to have, and one that presents compromise as a gesture of evolution. The climax is clean-cut but committed, revelling in the festival as an inclusive amendment of spirit rather than an exclusive ethnic statement. As a result, Dilwali Diwali has a movie-next-door charm: it trades the fireworks of imperfect familyhood for the elegant lamps of kinship.