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'Be Happy' Movie Review: Abhishek Bachchan's Film is Dance Drama for Dummies
Remo D’Souza’s dad-daughter-dance triangle is a dull bubblegum movie.
Director: Remo D’Souza
Writers: Remo D’Souza, Tushar Hiranandani, Kanishka, Chirag Garg
Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Inayat Verma, Nassar, Nora Fatehi, Harleen Sethi
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video
Language: Hindi
If you watch Hindi cinema for a living (or a loving), chances are you will be cursed with the Red Flag Syndrome. What is this syndrome, you ask? (You didn’t ask, but I’m telling you anyway because clunky exposition is in my DNA). Being able to identify red flags in a film — or being able to see through a story within the first few scenes — used to be a superpower. But now it’s almost a crime, like X-ray vision for perverse superheroes: you’re accused of seeing the film naked. It took me all of 30 seconds to commit this crime with Be Happy.
The first red flag unfolds when the movie opens with a dream sequence whose musical theme goes "dream dream dreammmm". The next red flag is instant. This dream belongs to a child named Dhara (Inayat Verma), who wakes up, speaks to her single dad Shiv (Abhishek Bachchan) as if she’s Anjali (not the love interest) in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) — which means she descends from the long lineage of adolescent Bollywood brats who think they’re buddies with their parents — and asks her dead mother’s photograph: "You couldn’t find anyone else or what?". The next flag arrives when Dhara’s Tamilian grandpa (Nassar) mistakenly remembers her teacher as 'Mrs. Lootera' instead of 'Mrs. Loretta' — the kind of pun that would’ve been cringey in 1995 — and the joke is punctuated with a cartoonish sound cue that goes boing-boing. The next one is when the opening titles appear over a random montage of a professional dancer (Nora Fatehi, as Maggie) gyrating to a saucy track. The subject of a title montage is usually the theme or protagonist of the film, but in this case, it’s a Remo D’Souza movie. There are no rules.
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The choreographer-turned-director remains committed to the craft of dancing (F.A.L.T.U, ABCD, ABCD 2, Street Dancer 3D), and if it means interrupting the story of the happy family in Ooty for the intro shot of an elastic supporting character, so be it. There are many more red flags in the next ten minutes itself — like when a nosy client asks bank employee Shiv why his wife can’t attend Dhara’s school events only so that he can forlornly respond with "she used to… when she was alive" — but you get the gist. When a cutesy dad-daughter-dance triangle opens like this, the only way up is down.
The premise is an add-on package. Dhara impresses the famous Maggie, and wants to join her Mumbai dance academy and qualify for a dance reality show. Papa Shiv is grumpy about it, but gives in once grandpa admonishes him for holding onto the past and refusing to leave Ooty after his wife’s accident. "Both Dhara and I have moved on," the old man insists, casually stigmatising the concept of grief to make Shiv support his daughter's dream-dream-dreammm. So Shiv gets a transfer to Mumbai (the bank offers him a free guest-house, of course), both father and daughter struggle to adapt to city life but then immediately adapt, and the reality show takes centerstage. Dhara puts a dating app on his phone, too, because she has her eyes on Maggie as "Mumma 2.0". When he swipes right on her profile, Maggie doesn’t find it creepy that her star student’s dad just swiped right on her. Shiv seems like the green flag who only does things for his daughter, so it doesn’t matter if he isn’t attracted to Maggie. When has that ever stopped men? Dhara’s match-making instincts stem from tween ancestor Anjali, but back in the day, summer camps used to be dating apps. Shiv and Maggie don’t have a chemical hope in hell, but when has that ever stopped movies?
Be Happy chooses to be the most juvenile version of itself. We’ve seen some simplistic method-children-tales (kiddie movies that treat their audience as kids) over the years, but none so blinded by the culture of competitive dancing. It is so preoccupied with the form and how these opportunities can change lives that the reality-show ecosystem is presented as an art-positive, empathetic and non-toxic setting of angels and geniuses. A lot of the choreography tends to sexualise the young contestants who blissfully ape the adults they idolise (Maggie herself impresses them with some of these moves), but such movies refuse to be mature enough to raise prickly ethical questions.
As a result, the film itself starts to resemble a commercially packaged dance show that is oblivious to the crippling pressure, moral loopholes and health hazards it poses to wide-eyed kids seduced by the spotlight of fame. The conflict inevitably emerges during Dhara’s time as a contestant — something predictable derails her dream-dream-dreammm — but the film refuses to blame the reality show and how far she pushes herself to win. The 'injury' is more natural. It doesn’t help that the film makes iffy creative choices about how it treats this challenge, stigmatising her condition in pursuit of narrative drama.
In a not-so-parallel world, Be Happy would be accused of brownwashing the blind spots of reality entertainment, but since it’s children we’re talking about, the propaganda isn't as tangible. I'm all for inspirational stories of talented prodigies, but there's a thin line between celebrating the artist and romanticising a system designed to milk them dry. Like many of the director's previous movies, Be Happy is too busy building up to a punchy dance finale. The rest is about as genuine as the judges who ham it up every time a camera is on them. When most of the climactic performance features reaction shots of producers and judges and audience members and strangers and dogs wiping their eyes, you know that the performance itself isn’t skillful enough to manipulate our feelings.
I could swear I saw Johnny Lever as a goofy security guard who tells ghost stories, but perhaps he was shoehorned in as a lucky charm after his cameo in I Want To Talk (2024), the only solid film in Abhishek Bachchan’s questionable-dad multiverse (other entries: Bob Biswas, Breathe: Into The Shadows). The roles were reversed there — the father was going through a health crisis — but I like that a sub-plot revolves around Bachchan’s long-time aversion to dancing (hint: a family round), which ties nicely into the actor’s self-deprecatory image. But this is undone by the red flags in this film mutating into saffron flags. The Shiv-Dhara performance isn’t great but it involves mythology and history, so she becomes a household name and the contest favourite — an unwitting ode to how spectacle storytelling works these days. It’s about what they do, not how they do it. That line sounded cleaner in my head.
Come to think of it, for someone so devoted to his daughter, Shiv isn’t exactly father of the year. (We are entering spoiler territory here, but you’re the red flag if you haven’t guessed the film’s gimmick yet). His list of mistakes is long. The man fails to notice the early symptoms of Dhara’s illness. Later on, he is drinking with his father-in-law on the terrace when he comes back to see her unconscious. At one point, he informs a hospitalised Dhara that he’s going home to pick up some clothes, only to encounter a big Ganesh Chaturti celebration on the streets, break into a wild song-and-dance prayer and totally forget that he has a sick daughter waiting. He basically abandons science. When he does reach home, he’s drenched in colour, it's late and he stops to chat with the guard. What must the nurses have told the poor girl? What if she’s still waiting? He’s the kind of guy who’d lose a custody battle to the ghost of his wife.
If this isn’t enough, the film decides to villainise the only responsible adult in the story — the grandpa who focuses on Dhara’s well-being — so that Shiv can violate all rules of caregiving and be a reckless parent. It may look tempting on paper, but when not supported by sound film-making and self-awareness, such sentimental tropes rarely land. There’s a token celebrity cameo to make the movie look like it’s socially significant. There’s an amusement park song that, in the good old days, would’ve been a teary orphanage ballad where everyone humours the kid in the wheelchair. There’s also a final slate that goes "dreams are hopes with wings". Most of all, the title of the film offers empty advice. At this moment, how can I be happy? How can I not worry? To misquote Bojack Horseman: Not even rose-coloured glasses can normalise the redness of these flags.