Zoya, our princess of posh pain

Most of our beloved Mumbai directors have very specific MOs.

Karan Johar movies: Where beautiful people do beautiful things to each other while dancing to Punjabi music.

Anurag Kashyap movies: Where ugly people do ugly things to one another.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali movies: Where ethnic people do ethnic things to each other.

Imtiaz Ali movies: Where beautiful people fall in love while travelling in planes, trains, buses, and cars.

Mohit Suri movies: Where beautiful people do ugly things to themselves while singing chart busting songs.

Zoya Akhtar movies: Where beautiful people do ugly things to each other.

Call her the princess of posh pain. In Luck By Chance, she showed us what success in Bollywood could cost - your soul. In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, she showed us three gorgeous men dealing with their demons while travelling across Spain. Now, in Dil Dhadakne Do, there are the beautiful Mehras and their well-kept friends sailing across Turkey, fighting, falling in love, finding friends, losing money, and doing other assorted things Delhi wealthies do.

Zoya is unusual in that her characters are not necessarily likeable, even if they are parents, a class of people usually dealt with kid gloves in Mumbai cinema. They usually do no wrong, sacrifice everything for their children, and suffer long and interminably. Not the Mehras. Kamal Mehra is what they call a self-made man, who runs a plastics manufacturing company named after his two children and cheats regularly on his wife whom he has been with since she was 18. He is played with relish by Anil Kapoor, who is not afraid to look the part - an ageing Delhi businessman who works hard to attain the body of a 24-year-old, looks through his daughter Ayesha (a lovely Priyanka Chopra), lavishes attention on his son Kabir (a pappu-like Ranveer Singh), and tries to drown his money worries in lots of whisky.

His wife, Neelam, played very well by Shefali Shah, lives with the constant whispers of her husband's infidelities even as she swans through Delhi lunching with friends, gossiping on the phone, looking after her son, and buying Louis Vuitton shoes and bags. Kamal and Neelam are not happy, but they are not divorced despite 30 years of sniping about food, clothes, children. Zoya chronicles a marriage gone sour well - Kamal's sulking face as he squeezes the oil out of a keema cutlet into a napkin and complains about unhealthy food on the dinner table, Neelam's distracted air as she sees her husband getting a little too familiar with a beautiful woman he meets during the cruise (did I say it was to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary - yes it's the kind of thing Delhi wealthies would do). They have no time to see the obvious - that Ayesha is unhappy in her marriage and Kabir is unfit to be CEO. So wrapped up are they in their problems, that when reality finally hits, they are shattered: "Our children hate us," says Kamal to Neelam at one point in the film, his hands shaking.

They have every reason to. When Ayesha asks her mother for advice on her marriage, she is told to focus on her home, stop this career nonsense (a travel portal she set up which has landed her in the Forbes' Top Ten Young Entrepreneurs list, ah) and have a baby. When Kabir seems to suggest an interest in a particular girl on the cruise, he is immediately seen as the answer to the money worries afflicting the family business. Husbands are obsessed with appearances, eager to please their mothers, even if they are irritating hypochondriacs like Zarina Wahab (playing Smita, Ayesha's mother in law). Wives are intent on spending their husbands' money. And children are practised at the art of deceiving their parents.

There are assorted couples, all of them in various stages of either trying to arrange their children's marriages or save their own. There are also the feudal aspects of business families - the brother who is treated as little better than a servant, the brother's wife who is used to spread gossip, the manager who is treated like family (but only just), and the marriages that are treated like business mergers.

Think of parts of Rana Dasgupta's Capital set to Bollywood music and embroidered with some energetic dance-offs. Think of Zoya Akhtar as the new Karan Johar, where NRI, the favourite '90s staple, has been replaced by the young, independent woman, Bollywood's favourite theme du jour; where celebrating the marriage has been replaced by celebrating the divorce; and where chiffon saris with zardozi borders have been swept away by flirty dresses and flowing gowns. In this version of Karan Johar cinema, it's all about hating your parents. It's all about looking global and being feudal, looking lovely and being ugly.