Wake Up Sid

They, four drunken young friends, are driving back home. They are happy and high. And Sidharth Mehra (Ranbir Kapoor) wants to enjoy the momentFilm: Wake Up Sid (Romance, Drama)
Cast : Ranbir Kapoor, Konkona Sen Sharma, Supriya Pathak, Anupam Kher, Shikha Talsania, Namit Das, Rahul Khanna.
Director : Ayan Mukerji
Duration: Two hours and 15 minutes

So he sticks his neck out of the sunroof and lets the friendly breeze feel his face. Without ambition or direction, that's how Sid would forever love his life to be: a cool breeze he can waltz with.

But life has a way of throwing up surprises. And none is bigger for the rich, cool kid than the accidental encounter with Aisha Banerjee (Konkona Sen Sharma), a just-arrived girl from Kolkata, the sort who reads Murakami's Norwegian Wood and hangs Woody Allen's Annie Hall posters in her room. She is independent, focused, gritty -- everything Sid is not. But there's a kismat connection between the two. And when Sid gets into a big fight with his dad over his career, or the lack of it, he moves out of his capacious home into Aisha's cuddly apartment. It is the beginning of his education in life and its realities, his first chapters of growing up.

Wake Up Sid could have been just another spoilt-brat's coming-of-age flick: plenty of attitude but bereft of soul. But it ends up being much, much more. And what makes it special is debutant director Ayan Mukerji's (also the film's writer) attention to detail, his nuanced way of looking at GenNow life. The relationship of the lead pair is every inch 21st century urban; but it doesn't follow the route of liplocks and no-condom sex to become so.

The change in the tenor of relationship between the lead pair as well as the texture of their own changing selves is detailed with diligence, delineated with tenderness. We understand Sid's joy on making his first omelette. And we enjoy the moment when he rustles up the fastest birthday cake in the world: a lone matchstick burning atop four pieces of bread and jam.

Mukerji gets the bigger picture right too. There's a subtlety with which he repairs the relationship between Sid and his mother (Supriya Pathak). The distance between the two is born out of the different cultures the two belong to. She is uneducated, he is westernised and the twain don't meet. There's a tragic dimension to the Punjabi mother who speaks English, even though it is pretty awful, hoping that it will bring her Westernised son closer. It's tragic because we know it's so real.