'The Great Shamsuddin Family' Movie Review: Home Truths and a Fun Ensemble

Farida Jalal didn’t grey her hair overnight. She’s been acting in movies since the 1960s. Since DDLJ, she’s been a sweet, endearing presence in Hindi films, buffing up large ensembles with her nourishing warmth. At 75, she’s a grande dame in the tradition of Zohra Sehgal and Nafisa Ali. Yet like those greats, Jalal is very much her own actor—as Shyam Benegal’s Mammo proved. Her new film, The Great Shamsuddin Family, directed by Anusha Rizvi, is also an ensemble comedy, with Jalal billed behind everyone else. Yet it only sparks to life when the actor joins the fray.

It’s not like Bani (Kritika Kamra) is having a charmed day before her aunt (Jalal) and mother (Dolly Ahaluwalia) turn up at her Delhi apartment. Bani is divorced, self-motivated, and, by her own admission, ‘not a liberal’—at least not the armchair, keyboard-smashing kind. She’s applying for a job at Berkeley College, US, and has a 12-hour deadline to turn in a presentation. This proves improbably difficult when members of her boisterous clan—mostly cousins and aunts, the Shamsuddins of the title—begin to invade her precious peace.

What follows is a comedy of major and minor escalations. As is common in such pressure-cooker scenarios, everyone has a progressively strange reason to call on Bani. No sooner has she typed out, “The thematic focus on marginalised voices and resistance…,” than the doorbell rings. And rings. Her cousin Iram (Shreya Dhanwanthary) is lugging a big bag of cash, and needs assistance depositing it in the bank. Bani’s elder sister, Humaira (Juhi Babbar Soni), is called in on forgery duty. At the heart of the film, also, are two interfaith relationships to contend with: one on the brink of marriage, the other coming quietly apart on the fringes.

The old guard, meanwhile, has banded together for a pilgrimage to Mecca. Sheeba Chaddha and Natasha Rastogi complete the elderly quartet. I am not sure about the addition of two outside observers—Bani’s academic pal Amitav (Purav Kohli, rather ridiculous) and his new research assistant Latika (Joyeeta Dutta)—to the mix. Even without their annoying, blithesome presence, Bani is at the end of her wits. As Amitav puts it, “This is a big crisis. Huge! Massive!”

Rizvi, returning a decade and a half after Peepli Live, embraces the play-like structure of her second feature. She marshals a big cast confidently—after a while, you can draw a vague Shamsuddin family tree in your head. Barring a quick trip outdoors, the film stays firmly parked inside Bani’s apartment. The crosstalk across generations (and, at times, within the same generation) is humorous and telling. We can tell that Jalal’s Akko once ruled with an iron fist: her methods are described as ‘hitlerana’. The film is alive to the ironies of contemporary Muslim womanhood. At one point, Bani—who has a copy of 1984 and the Quran at home—is dispatched to fetch prayer mats (she can't remember where she kept them). And there is a lovely mid-shot of Jalal, Ahluwalia and Chaddha, their heads covered, offering namaz in unison.

Less confident is the film’s reckoning with the outer world. Rizvi parallels the dysfunctions within the Shamsuddin family with the larger symptoms of our oppressive times. The language here is oddly oblique: there are references to the ‘current situation’, to ‘things that are going on’, to buses being burned and writers and lovers falling prey to mob scrutiny. The film soft-pedals its topicality in an era of self-censorship, with streaming platforms turning their backs on political storytelling. Still, there’s a heavy-handedness here—Amitav spells out the central analogy—that sits awkwardly with the memory of Rizvi’s first film, one of the great satires of 21st century India.

The Great Samshuddin Family is more sweet than it is subversive. It is a gentle and often delightful watch, its potency largely derived from its performances. Look at Sheeba Chaddha as the keen-eared Saafiya, teasing out critical information from her sisters. Or Jalal as she huffs and beams and cuts everyone else down to size. In my favourite scene, an appeal is made to the authority of a male character who isn’t there. Peals of laughter follow. “Chote bhai ka daar dikha rahi hain,” Jalal scoffs and giggles. Who’s afraid of their younger brother?