Darsheel Safary has gifted to us one of the best child acting performances ever captured on film. Not once did he falter nor reveal that the gripping illusory world of Ishaan was just an act. Part of this credit goes to the directors for getting such a young actor to evoke that poignant childlike wisdom and an extraordinary range of emotions. The melodrama therein is very powerful on account of it too. However, mostly everything and everyone else outside of Ishaan himself felt worthless at best, and downright stupid at worst.
Let's begin with the most major character: the teacher. I begin to tire of these Bollywood premises with a super humble central male figure who is somehow magically the Chosen One who can save the world and wake everyone else up - usually the protagonist, but in this film Ishaan is moreso the protagonist. However, that doesn't make the teacher any less the stereotypical Bollywood male lead. In the beginning my hopes were high when we kept focus on the glorious world of Ishaan, a very different take for Bollywood. But then I was disappointed to find that we still had that heroic savior figure, albeit thankfully a little more in the background than usual. His acting was fine, but his whole character is very over the top: the all-too-perfect person with a moral sense of superiority over everyone else and, of course, why not also throw in that all-too-coincidentally he had the exact same problem as Ishaan. Even the dialogue he speaks to his girlfriend more or less alludes to the boy needing a savior, and of course nobody can but him!
Along the same vein as the teacher being absurdly unrealistically "positive", we have an almost comedically "negative" everybody else. Somehow not a single soul around him, parents, teachers, new boarding school teachers, classmates, etc. even give him the slightest patience to figure out what his problem might be and work around it? It's not even the realism of the overall situation I attack. I'm sure this has happened several times in reality: a boy's problems just go under the radar like this and none are the wiser. But this negative stage was set in an artificial and contrived manner by the writers intentionally with the express purpose of making the teacher look that much more "positive". It just makes his whole character, and by extension everyone else's, feel that much more extreme in their respective polarities.
These critiques aside, the film is still absolutely worth seeing just to get swept away into the rich colorful world of Ishaan's mind. Maybe consider fast forwarding past all the scenes that don't include him.
Let's begin with the most major character: the teacher. I begin to tire of these Bollywood premises with a super humble central male figure who is somehow magically the Chosen One who can save the world and wake everyone else up - usually the protagonist, but in this film Ishaan is moreso the protagonist. However, that doesn't make the teacher any less the stereotypical Bollywood male lead. In the beginning my hopes were high when we kept focus on the glorious world of Ishaan, a very different take for Bollywood. But then I was disappointed to find that we still had that heroic savior figure, albeit thankfully a little more in the background than usual. His acting was fine, but his whole character is very over the top: the all-too-perfect person with a moral sense of superiority over everyone else and, of course, why not also throw in that all-too-coincidentally he had the exact same problem as Ishaan. Even the dialogue he speaks to his girlfriend more or less alludes to the boy needing a savior, and of course nobody can but him!
Along the same vein as the teacher being absurdly unrealistically "positive", we have an almost comedically "negative" everybody else. Somehow not a single soul around him, parents, teachers, new boarding school teachers, classmates, etc. even give him the slightest patience to figure out what his problem might be and work around it? It's not even the realism of the overall situation I attack. I'm sure this has happened several times in reality: a boy's problems just go under the radar like this and none are the wiser. But this negative stage was set in an artificial and contrived manner by the writers intentionally with the express purpose of making the teacher look that much more "positive". It just makes his whole character, and by extension everyone else's, feel that much more extreme in their respective polarities.
These critiques aside, the film is still absolutely worth seeing just to get swept away into the rich colorful world of Ishaan's mind. Maybe consider fast forwarding past all the scenes that don't include him.