Boy, it’s been awhile since we had a nice glitzy release, right?  With lots of pretty clothes and songs and a wedding somewhere in there?  Well, if that’s what you’ve been waiting for, here it is!

This was a very impressive movie in a lot of ways.  A complex concept very nicely executed.  As we know from the trailer, our hero falls asleep the night before his wedding and wakes up in the future, and then keeps skipping forward through his life.  Every skip is handled slickly, nice new technology, subtle fashion changes, nothing that feels clunky or beyond the reach of the CGI they have available.

Everything else is slick too.  Songs are excellent, for one.  And all composed by different people!  What’s up with that?  All newcomer/outsiders too.  Amaal Malik, Badshah, Bilal Saeed, all of them newish singer/composers, all of them more form the popular music side of things than film.

(This was the end credits song, and the entire audience stayed for the whole thing.  It’s just that good)

Although that matches with some of the other things about the film that feel very anti-mainstream.  Lots of songs, but most of them montage type things.  Very minimal extended family stuff.  Family was important, and mentioned, but it wasn’t the same kind of integral to conflict thing that it usually is.

Everyone is very upperclass.  So upperclass that there is no awareness of an alternative.  They don’t exactly have a cab driver or a storekeeper at their wedding, or any consideration of a career as a way to make money to buy food, rather than to fulfill themselves.

And everyone is very international.  Although, that leads to one of my favorite things, which I will get to in a minute.  But still, this casual travel between Delhi and Cambridge on the part of all the characters, not just that the expense isn’t considered, but that everyone is at that level where being in Delhi or Cambridge is kind of the same, because money can make it comfortable.

But, like I said, this also leads to one of my favorite things, they way they integrate Katrina’s real life transnational background into her character.  Her mother is white and her early years were spent in Britain.  But, as we see in the opening flashback, she was lonely and sad her whole time there.  When the family moved to India when she was 8, she blossomed, become confident and happy.  Katrina’s identity as Indian in this movie, just as in real life, is a matter of choice, not birth, and is all the stronger for it.

And it’s this sense of identity that drives the conflict.  I was nervous going in how they would handle a love marriage between a long time couple and still create conflict.  But, that’s where the conflict comes from!  These are people who have been together long enough to take each other for granted.  And who are old enough to know what they want out of life.

We open with a nice montage song showing how they met as children, grew up together, started a romance as teenagers, and have now been together so long that they are like an old married couple.  Only, they aren’t actually married.  So Katrina suggests that they just go ahead and do it.  None of this is spoilers, by the way, it’s all in the first five minutes and most of it is in the trailer too.

But it sets up a great conflict, essentially Sidharth’s freak-out is his midlife crisis, only at his wedding.  He has already spent a lifetime with Katrina, he doesn’t appreciate her anymore, or what they have together.  And Katrina is in the position of a middle-aged housewife, she has planned her whole life around and about Sidharth, she is completely thrown and doesn’t even know how to react when he claims to be unhappy.

And that’s also what drives the time jumps.  It’s not that “something goes wrong” after they get married, their relationship is already moving on a set path now, pre-marriage, the problems were there are along, and all the time jumps do is show him what was already a problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5az4Q1BaSG8

(Well, okay, this bit at least is just completely happy)

So, Katrina’s identity is someone who knows how important her family, her friends, and her life is.  Because she only really felt like she had family, friends, and a life after they moved to India, after her lonely early years.  What’s Sidharth identity that is causing him to want something different from life?

Well, he is a mathematician!  Now, full disclosure, I have a mathematician in my family, I have spent WEEKS of my life at mathematician social events, and in almost all ways, Sidharth is not what real mathematicians are like.  For one thing, his hair does not look like his wife cuts it.  For another, he can apparently actually dress himself.  For a third, he can do arithmetic in his head.  I don’t want to burst any fantasies you may have, but theoretical mathematicians can’t actually to arithmetic.  Numbers confuse them.  They could give you a brilliantly theoretical system to calculate the answer, but once you put actual numbers in there and look for a real world results, then it all falls apart.  Actually, once you ask them to do ANYTHING real world, it all falls apart.  Watching people try to use the coffee machine in the MIT math lounge is hilarious.

One thing that is kind of accurate, is that high level mathematicians have a super stressful and time consuming job.  The expectation is that you can drop everything at a moment and travel halfway across the world, that you work everyday all day skipping family events and your own health, and that you have a wife somewhere in the background to take care of everything else in your life.  And that’s what Sidharth is dealing with, he wants to achieve his dreams and his goals and be satisfied in his professional life.  And that means that his personal life has to come second, all those things that make Katrina happy have to fall in line behind his career.  Which is, of course, a perfect thing to unlearn before you actually get married.