Dil Dhadakne Do

About the film

Dil Dhadakne Do (transl. 'Let the heart beat') is a 2015 Indian Hindi-language family comedy drama film directed by Zoya Akhtar and produced by Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar under the Excel Entertainment banner. The film stars Anil Kapoor, Shefali Shah, Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh, Anushka Sharma and Farhan Akhtar with a voice-over narration by Aamir Khan. The film tells the story of the Mehras, a dysfunctional family who invite their family and friends on a 10-day cruise trip to celebrate the parents' 30th wedding anniversary and later reconcile.

Zoya conceived the film as a family drama centred on a brother-sister relationship. She wanted to depict a more realistic sibling relationship in contrast to the dubious and over-the-top portrayal for which Bollywood is known. She later wrote the script with her friend and longtime collaborator Reema Kagti, while Farhan penned the dialogues. Much of the principal photography was done on Pullmantur Cruises' ship MS Sovereign while sailing across the Mediterranean and Europe, and on land in France, Spain, Italy, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Plot

Kamal Mehra is a self-made billionaire businessman based in Delhi who faces imminent financial ruin as his conglomerate, AyKa, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. This corporate stress compounds his deeply fractured relationships with his wife Neelam, his daughter Ayesha, and his son Kabir. Ayesha operates a highly successful corporate travel enterprise in Mumbai but is profoundly trapped in an unhappy marriage to Manav Sangha, a narcissistic and controlling executive whose wealthy family harbors an underlying contempt for the Mehras. Meanwhile, Kabir is forced to undergo grooming to inherit his father's industrial empire, despite harboring a personal dream of becoming a commercial pilot.

To project an illusion of corporate stability and celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Kamal and Neelam invite their affluent social circle for a ten-day luxury cruise across the Mediterranean Sea. Among the guests are the Sood family. Kamal and Neelam covertly plan to orchestrate a marriage alliance between Kabir and the Soods' daughter, Noorie, in a strategic bid to secure a massive financial investment from her father, Lalit, to liquidate AyKa's debts. However, the plan derails when Kabir falls in love with Farah Ali, a British-Pakistani dancer performing on the cruise. Concurrently, Noorie has secretly fallen for Rana Khanna, the son of her family's bitter rivals.

As the voyage progresses, social pressures mount on Ayesha and Manav to conceive a child; unknown to anyone, Ayesha has been consistently taking birth control pills to avoid anchoring herself to her husband. Tensions escalate further when Sunny Gill, the son of Kamal's long-term manager, joins the cruise as a journalist. Sunny and Ayesha were deeply in love during their youth, but Kamal had intentionally separated them by financing Sunny’s scholarship to Yale University to prevent a marriage below their social standing. Unlike the patriarchal Manav, Sunny openly respects Ayesha's fierce independence, and the two find themselves reviving their repressed romantic feelings.

Production

When Excel Entertainment announced its upcoming films in March 2012, one of them was Zoya Akhtar's next film following Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011). It was reported that she was working on a script and that filming was due to start in December 2012. Akhtar dismissed the reports, saying she was yet to start writing her next script. In May that year, media reports suggested Akhtar was already writing her next film. That July, it was reported the script was about siblings partially based on Akhtar and her brother Farhan Akhtar. Farhan Akhtar later denied reports of the film being autobiographical, saying it had nothing to do with their real life relationship and that it is entirely a work of fiction. In November 2012, Akhtar said she was still writing the script and that the film was a family drama.

Akhtar co-wrote the screenplay with her long-time friend and collaborator Reema Kagti. Akhtar had always aspired to make a family drama with a brother-sister relationship at its core. She felt such topics not been well represented in Indian films, and that the brother-sister relationship bond has always been shown "wrapped in rituals" and never portrayed as it really is. She believed the theme of brother-sister relationships "generally have cheesy representations. They are never at ease. This is one of the most important relationships in the world because nobody else shares your parents. I wanted to show that relationship in Dil Dhadakne Do." Akhtar also wanted to showcase the quirkiness of a dysfunctional family, with different layers to each family member, saying, "the beauty of families lies in their flaws".

When asked whether the film had any similarities with her own life and family, she said it had none and that the only thing common to herself and the film's characters was the bond between her and her brother; all their problems and conflicts were unalike. Akhtar said the film was a partly fictionalised version of people around her, such as her friends and their families, and her observations from literature and news articles. Kagti and Akhtar revealed that some of their material came from observing people of Delhi during their friends' back-to-back, elite-class wedding parties as they were finishing the script; they made notes about people's behaviour and demeanour, and incorporated these into their script. After finalising the characters, they felt something was missing, so they added Pluto, the family dog, as an observer. The completed film has 25 characters and a dog.

Key details