Spoiler alert!
Just when a story appears to be heading towards its happily ever after, a character turns helpless, as a serious ailment consumes their being. Sickness on screen is a sure shot way of seeking audience sympathy and turning on the waterworks.
In Saiyaara — the brand new love story taking Bollywood by storm — a troubled singer’s discovery of his ladylove’s onset of Alzheimer — looms large on their passionate romance as she struggles to remember his significance in her life.
Director Mohit Suri’s tragic twist, strongly reminiscent of South Korea’s A Moment to Remember, is the source of much melodrama on screen but the box office hasn’t looked THIS happy in a long, long time.
Sukanya Verma looks at the many portrayals of Alzheimer’s disease in Hindi movies, which have met with varying degrees of success.
U, Me Aur Hum
Directed by Ajay Devgn, the schmaltzy drama revolves around real and reel wife Kajol as a woman losing a grip on her life following her unexpected Alzheimer diagnosis.
With all the loving memories of their marital life slipping away and the responsibility of embracing motherhood just around the corner, a husband and wife must navigate through an uncertain journey with the promise of U, Me Aur Hum.
Kajol’s heartfelt confusion and tremendous intensity ensures it’s a performance to remember.
Black
Amitabh Bachchan goes from a teacher coming to a deaf and mute Anglo Indian girl’s rescue with bold, brash teaching methods to an aging, ailing man slowly consumed by Alzheimer’s in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s poignant tale.
Ever a tour de force, Bachchan captures this shift in health as movingly as his determination to empower his specially abled student.
Maine Gandhi Ko Nahi Maara
Anupam Kher flexes his acting prowess to play a retired professor whose absent-mindedness is actually an Alzheimer issue.
Battling childhood demons and a deeply embedded guilt leads him to believe he may have had a hand in Mahatma Gandhi’s demise and it reduces him into a figure of fear and uncertainty, one his empathetic daughter Urmila Matondkar urgently addresses in Maine Gandhi Ko Nahi Maara.
Uri: The Surgical Attack
Alzheimer may not be central to Vicky Kaushal’s war thriller inspired by real events but plays a crucial role anyway.
Given that it afflicts his elderly mother, played by a sublime Swaroop Sampat, and compels him to seek premature retirement or take up a role that keeps him away from the field and on desk until his seniors urge him to attend to both his mother and motherland.
Mai
An Alzheimer diagnosis is as trying for the patient as it is for their family, insists Mai.
Starring Asha Bhosle in a rare acting role as an ailing mother to Padmini Kolhapure wherein the latter is forced to juggle between work and home, Mai documents the trauma of geriatric insecurity and dependency.
Goldfish
Set in England, the Kalki Koechlin-Deepti Naval led poignant mother-daughter story looks into the nature of caregiving between an estranged parent-child pair after the latter’s Alzheimer rears its ugly head.
Deepti Naval’s layered portrayal lends emotional textures to a character caught between then and now.
Listen…Amaya
Farooq Shaikh’s amiable photographer and his close bond with Deepti Naval’s cafe owner is the source of much furor in the latter’s daughter, Swara Bhaskar’s mind.
But she realises the folly of her ways and value of compassion on learning about Shaikh’s Alzheimer.
OK Jaanu
In Shaad Ali’s remake of Mani Ratnam’s O Kadhal Kanmani, Naseeruddin Shah and Leela Samson play an affectionate couple giving relationship goals to their younger, undecided counterparts Aditya Roy Kapur and Shraddha Kapoor.
What makes their devotion towards each other even more moving is Samson’s Alzheimer condition and Naseer’s understanding attitude around it.
A Suitable Boy
It’s not a big role but Sheeba Chaddha’s profound confusion and detached air leaves a poignant impression as a secondary character’s Alzheimer-stricken mother as part of Mira Nair’s ensemble cast in an adaptation of Vikram Seth’s period novel.
