Dear Farhan Akhtar, Please Stay Away From These 5 Stereotypes In Your Girls Road Trip Film

Jee Le Zaraa film: "About time the girls took the car out." With this, actor-filmmaker Farhan Akhtar announced his return to direction, fittingly, on the 20th anniversary of his iconic Dil Chahta Hai. The girls road trip film Jee Le Zaraa will star Priyanka Chopra, Alia Bhatt and Katrina Kaif as they adventure around behind the wheel.

Explaining how the film came about and the mood behind it, Chopra in an Instagram post wrote she was in pursuit of a film that was "different, cool, never been done before... The idea grew into a movie helmed by an all-female cast." An "impulsive call" was made to Kaif and Bhatt "about this idea that involved 3 on-screen girlfriends. A celebration of friendship we called it!!" The stars aligned in their favour as Akhtar, whom they wanted to work on this dream project, was at the time working on a girls road trip film himself. "This one is to sisterhood," Chopra says.

No doubt, the Akhtar brother-sister duo, Farhan and Zoya, are masters of this genre. Their first venture back in 2001 Dil Chahta Hai gave flight to a whole generation's dreams of what imperfect perfect friendships are and how a Goa trip looked like - and so über cool and relevant it was that two decades on, it remains the steady benchmark of youth aspirations. In 2011, another trio of men (more grown than the last) tripped across Spain in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara - revelling, bantering, self-discovering.

The Akhtars know how to take audiences along on road trips, so naturally, expectations from Jee Le Zaraa are high. But since a female cast headlines such a film for the first time in a genre that has been under-explored in India, questions arise about its treatment: Will representation be equally effortless as before or is there a risk of falling into habitual Bollywood gender stereotypes?

Girls Road Trip? What We Hope Jee Le Zaraa Film Is NOT

1. A Cliche Of Mushy Love Troubles

Love and boy talk as a parallel track threaded through the characters' lives? Sure. Love and boy talk as the foregrounding subject throughout the film? No, please. A road trip film should first be a road trip film and then anything else, regardless of the gender it is centred around. A preoccupation with the girls' love lives, sobbing through heartbreaks, obsessive bandying about boys is something we're not going in expecting. Comedy, coming-of-age realisations, fun and a few laughs - now that's what we're looking forward to.

2. Stereotyped Women Characters 

When the premise is around a group of friend characters, male or female, one can be assured almost always of stereotypical boxes they will be conveniently limited within. For instance, the geek and the rebel in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. Or the diva versus the naive simpleton in Aisha. There is some semblance of comfort and order Hindi films find in relying on overused tropes to define their women, who can be one thing and strictly not another. Here's hoping the mould breaks (or at least melts a little) with Jee Le Zaraa. 

3. Smoking/Drinking As Entire Personality Traits 

This one is a thin, tricky line to tread on since only till a point, the smoking-drinking habits of a character can be presented indifferently in ">Bollywood. Once it spills over beyond that mark, what we have is a deliberate push on a certain kind of hackneyed imagining of women empowerment that appears as anything but authentic. Cases in point: women-centric films like Lipstick Under My Burkha and Cocktail. Sure, she can smoke, drink, wear what she wants. But only since she is empowered to make those choices, not because she is seeking empowerment through them.

4. Friendship That's Not Really Friendship 

Much has been said in our films about the 'bro codes' of guy friendships and they have had the pleasant quality of hitting the nail exactly on the head. Who doesn't like journeying, even if vicariously, through unproblematic friendships on-screen? It's a joy. But the Indian film industry has a serious paucity of representation of how women's friendships actually are. The 'girl gangs' or 'sisterhoods' on-screen are artificially manufactured and work around the plot, never independently. And never in aimless, relaxed, purposeless, random settings - as friendships usually are. This is something that desperately needs to come alive on screen.

5. A Dil Chahta Hai Copy 

There was something wholly fresh and organic about the magic of Dil Chahta Hai that it has endured for two decades and beyond now. The dynamics between Sid, Akash and Sam are, for many, still the touchstone of friendships that keep us afloat as heartbreaks, careers, lives happen to us. Though the baton has been passed forward onto the girls of Jee Le Zaraa, that original legacy should go untouched. The women road-tripping through India in Akhtar's new film should be given space to create their own with the care, attention and merriness that women's friendships so deserve.

Views expressed are the author's own.