Dining with the Kapoors

The Legacy of a Lunch

Cinema, at its most elemental, is an act of preservation—a way to pickle time, to jar the ephemeral so it might be tasted later. In *Dining with the Kapoors*, director Smriti Mundhra attempts to preserve not a filmography, but a feeling. Following her triumphant deep dive into the Yash Chopra dynasty with *The Romantics*, Mundhra turns her lens toward the Kapoors, Hindi cinema’s "First Family," ostensibly to mark the centenary of the late Raj Kapoor. However, what unfolds is less a historical audit and more a high-gloss home movie—a sixty-minute sensory experience that is as rich in ghee as it is light on revelation.



Mundhra’s visual language here is distinct from the archival rigor of *The Romantics*. She trades the interview chair for the dining chair, adopting a fly-on-the-wall intimacy that feels simultaneously candid and curated. The cinematography is warm, bathed in the golden hues of nostalgia and the literal steam rising from Junglee Mutton and Paya. The camera lingers on food with the same reverence it usually reserves for starlets, treating the family’s culinary heritage—anchored by host and grandson Armaan Jain—as a supporting character in its own right. It is a visual feast that suggests the Kapoor legacy is digested as much as it is watched.

Yet, there is a palpable tension between the documentary’s form and its function. The film posits itself as an "unfiltered" look at the dynasty, but the filter is the point. We are watching the Kapoors perform "The Kapoors." The conversations, led by the effervescent Kareena Kapoor Khan and the surprisingly sentimental Ranbir Kapoor, oscillate between genuine familial ribbing and self-conscious myth-making. They discuss the "terror" of Raj Kapoor’s parties and the weight of the surname, but the dialogue often skims the surface, like a stone skipping over deep water. We see the camaraderie, but we rarely glimpse the cracks in the porcelain.



The film’s emotional anchor, surprisingly, is not the superstars but Rima Jain. In a scene that cuts through the celebrity veneer, she sits at a piano, channeling a grief and love for her father that feels startlingly raw amidst the banter. It is in these smaller moments—Randhir Kapoor’s quiet gaze, or the collective mourning for the sold Deonar Cottage—that the film finds its heart. Here, the documentary transcends its "celebrity special" trappings to become a universal meditation on the displacement of family history. The loss of the physical home renders the gathering itself the new architecture of their legacy.

Ultimately, *Dining with the Kapoors* is a comfort watch that refuses to be challenging. It does not deconstruct the nepotism debate or air dirty laundry; it simply sets a place at the table. For those seeking a forensic analysis of Bollywood’s power structures, the meal will taste under-seasoned. But for those willing to accept it as a mood piece—a cinematic dessert rather than a main course—it offers a fleeting, fragrant reminder that even the gods of cinema are just mortals looking for the next good meal.