Why All is Well in the unhappy families of Bollywood

The good thing first: Bollywood is finally discovering the dysfunctional family, beyond Barjatya-patented plastic perfection.

When Rishi Kapoor and Abhishek Bachchan returned to the screens this week as a warring father-son duo in the ironically-titled All is Well, the film - flawed as it was - tried exploring less happy aspects of familial ties just as Piku, Dil Dhadakne Do and Tanu Weds Manu Returns did earlier.

The great Indian family is not going away from the Hindi screen just yet. But even as the family that eats together, prays together looms large on the comeback trail with Prem Ratan Dhan Payo later in Diwali, the more adventurous among Bollywood's filmmakers are exploring awful truths on the home front.

Which brings us to the not-so-good thing about the trend: Nothing in Bollywood happens outside box office diktats. Even the dysfunctional has to be functionally viable in approach and execution so that it fits a profit-making model.

These films, mainly aimed at multiplex crowds, are not up for a 400/500 crore grab - that bit remains the domain of Sooraj Barjatya's Salman Khan-flaunting mush monsters. But with smart packaging, Bollywood's "real" family fare can be good enough for a 100-crore haul, as Piku and Tanu Weds Manu Returns showed.

The team of All is Well must have hoped for as much, riding the story of a family that discovers love for each other while they are on the run from a bunch of goons. Like most of Bollywood's new-age films hard-selling the "real" family, relationship tangles in All is Well are conveniently created and sorted out to suit demands of a feel-good script. Like Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone's basically nice Bengali father-daughter duo in Piku, or Kangana Ranaut's not-so-attractive Jat athlete who quietly lets go of the man of her dreams to the more gorgeous lookalike in Tanu Weds Manu Returns, characters and the drama in All is Well remain conveniently flat.

Our mainstream entertainers, despite gradually recognising dysfunctional traits, are still not brave enough to confront discomforting grey zones.

Zoya Akhtar's Dil Dhadakne Do is another recent instance. The film about a family of eccentrics cast Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah as super-rich parents who want their adult daughter (Priyanka Chopra) and son (Ranveer Singh) to do exactly as they want. The narrative in fact incorporated a number of families - all from the urban rich stratum - with characters young and old. Despite showing the minimum quality one expects from a Zoya Akhtar film, and despite its unusual theme, Dil Dhadakne Do has been her weakest film yet. Zoya seemed obsessed with play it safe this time, manipulating the reality inherent in relationships projected.

Dil Dhadakne Do seemed to operate on a one-track belief system, going by its story: All people of the past generation, namely parents, are schemers and want to dictate terms on their children. All children - if you can call them that, because they all mostly seem 30 or above - are simple, nice guys and girls.

Ironic isn't it, how black continues to be black-and-white stays white even in Bollywood's dysfunctional scheme of things.