The Fault is not in Our Stars (A review of the movie "Dil Beechara")

              "Dil Beechara" gathered the biggest audience because it was Sushant's last movie, and as the rule of our society goes, people are praised well after they have died. Among this bulk of the audience who watched the movie, only few would have been truly able to grab the core meaning of the movie. As a matter of fact, this movie was an adaptation of John Greene's novel "The Fault in our Stars" which was published in 2012.

               That book, and this movie, both deal with the characters that are not normal people, but the ones who are suffering from a certain disease, and that disease is Cancer, which is of course very devastating. The plot of the movie basically revolves around three main characters; Kizie Baasu, a young girl who is fighting thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs; Manny, a young boy whose Osteosarcoma (a cancerous tumor in a bone) caused him to lose his right leg; and JP, Manny's best friend, who is suffering from Glaucoma (a group of eye diseases which result in damage to the optic nerve and cause vision loss) and is blind in one eye.

               At the start of the movie, Kizie Baasu gives us a brief description of her life in general and we come to know that she feels so lonely in this crowded world, and to get rid of this pinching loneliness she often attends the funerals of unknown people and hugs unknown people there to share their grief. In the tiring hours of loneliness, her only friend is music which she so fondly listens to. Her biggest wish in life is to meet Abhimanyu Veer, the music artist whose unfinished album she always listens to.

               Manny and his friend JP are shooting a movie of their own and Manny invites Kizie to play the female lead role in that movie. Kizie accepts the offer and they both start to spend a lot of time together until Manny falls in love with Kizie Baasu. There is a scene when Kizie becomes a little angry at Manny when he is putting a cigarette in his mouth and she asserts that it's too foolish of him to put that cigarette in his mouth when he has already got cancer. At this, Manny replies that he only puts the cigarette in his mouth but never lights it. In the book "The Fault in our Stars", this line is written in the following words:

"You put an object of death right between your lips, but you don't give it the power to kill you."

               As the time passed, JP lost his second eye and he became completely blind, causing the delay in the shooting of the movie. Meanwhile, Manny remains successful in contacting Abhimanyu Veer through e-mail and he invites Kizie and Manny to Paris. Kizie becomes very excited but her health deteriorates more adversely this time, standing as a hurdle between her and Paris. Manny tries to convince her father by saying,

"I dream big and I dream too much, but I never wanted to fulfill my dreams. Meeting Abhimanyo is Kizie's only dream and it's a very little dream, but I don't know why I want to fulfill this dream of hers at any cost."

               This dialogue of Manny throws some brighter light on the argument that real happiness and pure satisfaction lies in the effort of fulfilling the dreams of someone else than our own. Kizie finally gets the consent of the doctor to travel to Paris but only if she is accompanied by her mother.

               Manny, Kizie, and her mother fly to Paris. Kizie and Manny meet Abhimanyo there and Kizie asks him why he left his last album unfinished, but to their utter disappointment, they found him to be just a stupid drunkard who never talks seriously. He tells Kizie that he left his last song unfinished because this life is never complete, when someone dies, the hope of living happily also dies with him. Kizie takes this seriously and when they come out she tells Manny that he was right.

"We are not actually afraid of death, but we are afraid of the thought that how our loved ones, who will be left behind, would manage to live happily after we are gone. What will happen to mummy daddy, how will you survive without me, he was right, life is never complete, it can't be, like that song."

               Manny and Kizie get some free time to roam around Paris together. They spend one night together in the hotel where they share their first kiss, and also for the very first time in their lives, they perform sex. Next day, Kizie confesses her love for Manny, but Manny tells her that his cancer has returned and it's just a matter of time when he'll be dead. They both return to their hometown with heavy hearts.

               Manny's health keeps on getting worse until Kizie forces him to get up and complete the shooting of the movie, which they successfully complete. Then one day, Manny arranges a mock funeral of his own where JP and Kizie narrate the speeches they have prepared. How many of us can feel the pain of a young boy attending his own funeral, who is aware with the hardest fact that he will be dead after a day or two? We can't. No one can. Only he knows that level of grief and pain while sitting there listening to the speeches which people will narrate after he dies, still able to maintain a smile on his face. Death! It's a pathetic thing, wonderful at the same time. After two days, Manny dies, leaving behind a letter for Kizie, the main line of that letter was following:

"When to be born and when to die, this we can't decide. But how we live the given time, that's totally in our own power."

               At the end of the movie, Manny's movie releases in open air theater which spectators enjoy very emotionally.

               Keeping in view the events of real life of Sushant, this movie "Dil Beechara" can be viewed with an intense symbolic lens and so many parallels can be drawn between this movie and the real life of Sushant. In the movie, Sushant looks very happy from outside but is fighting a devastating disease and is very painful from inside, he is shooting a movie which people watch emotionally after his death. Similarly in the real life, Sushant looked a very accomplished and satisfied man from outside, but, no one knows yet for which inward pain, he ended up killing himself with an attempt of suicide, he kept on shooting this movie "Dil Beechara" which we all watched after his death. This may be a coincidence, but we can't entirely overlook this symbolic importance of the last movie of Sushant in terms of what happened to him in real life.

               After watching the movie, people carrying a healthy brain over their heads would surely tend to contemplate on the transient nature of life. How short this life is, how true the death is, how false are the vain worldly things which often stop us from living life fully. What if we were the patients of cancer? What if we were not normal? Why do all of us take this normal life with good health for granted? Are we living life truly? What if death gets the better of us in the next encounter of life? Okay, Kizie and Manny had "fault in their stars" but what about us? I would love to finish this article with a quote of Shakespeare from his play "Julius Caesar."

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

             

                 (AWAIS BABAR)