Let’s be honest: life does not actually work the way it seems to in Dear Zindagi. What’s the likelihood that you’ll be in your early 20s, working as a cinematographer, a woman and be able to afford the apartment and life that Alia Bhatt’s Kaira does? How many psychologists look like Shah Rukh Khan and take their clients out cycling and wave-catching during their sessions? What are the chances that a good cry in the presence of aforementioned psychologist is all the therapy that a decade-old trauma needs to get out of the patient’s system?

The answer to all these questions is zero and yet, at least until interval of Dear Zindagi, it doesn’t matter. Because writer-director Gauri Shinde builds a reality that is fantastic while being in touch with the lived experience of the urban youth. Bollywood is all about suspension of disbelief, right? And in a weird way, Shinde’s unreality is one you can – and perhaps want to – imagine as reality. Here’s a Bollywood that’s open to fresh-faced, bright-eyed young woman like Kaira. Here are young people who don’t sound fake even if their world is, who hug their domestic help and who have friends that are closer than family. They have little patience for rules and convention, and are riddled with their own peculiar frustrations that seem inexplicable to others. They seem liberated and yet rattle cages  (by eating streetside chowmein) and yearn to feel truly free. It’s a beautiful world that isn’t unaware of ugliness.

Shinde’s heroine Kaira is a delight when we first meet her. With a camera harness strapped to her slight person and radiating ambition, Kaira chirrups with charm. However there are glimpses of the dents in her armour – she avoids her parents’ phone calls, juggles a number of men who are in love with her, and hits the dance floor at a night club after (wait for it) putting on headphones and her own music. Because that’s how millenials roll…?

Thanks to this being a film about the young, brands like eBay, Nature’s Basket, Bing and Skype get their logos in with all the delicacy of a hippopotamus doing a pirouette. By Bollywood standards though, the advertising is very subtle.  Within the first 10 minutes of Dear Zindagi, Kaira has bought things for herself on eBay. She stays in touch with people using Skype and raising enormous questions about her web-savvy is the fact that she uses Bing to search the internet.

Genuinely subtle is the storytelling in the pre-interval section. Shinde has written nuanced characters and there are no preachy bits. Shinde is also evidently unconvinced by the façade of liberalism that Bollywood has and she takes a delicate pickaxe to it. When Kaira asks if a producer is hiring her because she’s hot, it’s only half-joking. The personal invariably gets tangled with the professional, and of course everyone’s concern is whether the woman will be able to ‘handle’ it. There’s an unspoken acceptance that men are more professional and less emotional than women. From the way Kaira’s producer and one-time lover Raghuvendra (Kunal Kapoor, who is apparently bringing the manbun back) reacts to Kaira having a mini meltdown, you can see that he disapproves of her losing her temper. “You need to grow up,” he tells her at one point, smoothly ignoring the fact that it wasn’t particularly professional or mature of either of them to become lovers while working together and that he wanted Kaira out of her dream project because of their history.

By the time interval strikes, Shinde has shown us how fiercely Kaira keeps her facade together, hinted at past traumas and a deep-rooted unhappiness that lurks under her glossy Mumbai life. You sense the brittleness in her smile, how frazzled her edges are because of her insomnia.

Then, just before interval, Kaira meets Dr Jehangir Khan, has one session with him and has a dream that night, in which Kaira sees herself falling off a building.

The dream is prophetic. When the film restarts, it plunges much like dreamy Kaira did, into a messy puddle of triteness and superficiality. Bhatt and Khan do their best to salvage Dear Zindagi. The good part is both are charismatic and at their most charming. After a long time, Khan is an also-ran in a film, and he accepts that role with grace while going on to almost steal the show. Consider this: in a film that’s got hot, young male actors crawling out of every nook and cranny, Khan with his white-dusted beard and hair is still Prince Charming. This is particularly amazing since he tells really idiotic stories about Chinese mountaineers (complete with a cringe-worthy accent) and has to spout lines like, “Don’t let the past blackmail your present to ruin a beautiful future.”   

Bhatt is the shining star of this film. This is not as obvious an acting challenge as Udta Punjab or Highway, but there’s a normalcy to Kaira in Dear Zindagi that is perhaps more difficult to achieve. Bhatt manages beautifully. Whether she’s having a meltdown or noticing the guy who’s got his eye on her, she’s utterly credible. The one flaw in Bhatt’s performance is that her portrayal of this sprite-like, carefree Goa girl forgets the grown-up, cinematographer Kaira of the first half. It would have helped if Shinde had used the cinematography to make us sense how differently Kaira sees the world, but all the burden of this character is on Bhatt. She plays Kaira as on-edge in the first half and then in the second half, gradually moves into a more carefree, almost-childlike avatar that doesn’t seem to have any of the ambitions of the pre-interval Kaira.

Like Kaira, everything gets simplified in the second half. Therapy is a cakewalk. Insomnia dissolves easily into sleep. Old psychological scars are ripped open and healed in a snap. Conflicts are resolved, money for a short film just lands on Kaira’s lap. It’s like Goa is la-la land with Dr Khan as the wizard who lords over it. The only things missing are unicorns and rainbows with pots of gold (or Rs 100 notes) at the end of them. This is a shame because 149 minutes is enough time to lend complexity to the issues in the film.

Especially since there’s so much pop psychology that Dear Zindagi subjects its audience to in the second half, it’s tempting to turn a similar gaze upon Shinde’s storytelling. On the face of it, Shinde’s two films are very different. English Vinglish was about a middle-aged Shashi who feels belittled by her husband and daughter. She learns English and this serves two purposes: it builds her confidence and is an elegant middle finger salute to those who made fun of Shashi. In contrast to Shashi, Kaira is young, brash and sexually confident. Yet Shinde’s heroines are part of a tribe.

Both Shashi and Kaira are dissatisfied by the romantic relationships that they find themselves tied to and they yearn for love and to be valued by those who dismiss them. They are failed by their families and what stings particularly is how the women can’t count on their own gender. Just as Shashi’s daughter is cruelly bratty, Kaira’s mother’s rejection is the hurt that truly guts her. Both in English Vinglish and in Dear Zindagi, the heroines long for a man they can’t have and so, it seems they settle for what they can have. He’s not ideal, but they — and we — hope that he’ll be there for her.

As Shashi goes back to her idiotic husband and Kaira walks off with a man — who must be her match because he’s wearing the same colour she is — you can’t help but wonder whether Shinde and her heroines realise that these women don’t really need a man to complete their story.