In Zoya Akhtar's The Archies, The Kids Are Alright

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The Archies, Zoya Akhtar’s fifth feature, comes at an opportune moment. The film is an adaptation of the American comic of the same name which centers around a clumsy teenager, Archie Andrews, and his friends. They live in a fictional place called Riverdale where nothing much happens. Life is slow and easy. They hang at soda shops and deal with problems that need little solving. The city is frozen in time. In 1941 when the comic first started, it infiltrated pop culture for upholding easy innocence in a world that possessed less of it. The dreary World War II was ongoing (1939-1945) and Archie, in contrast, envisioned a space that was untouched by brutality. Its charm was relayed as a postwar flight of fancy or an alternate narrative — in either case the allure resided in being different from the then-present reality. In a minute but not insignificant way, Akhtar’s work shares this appeal.

The film retains a generous amount from its source material. The writers (Ayesha Devitre Dhillon, Reema Kagti and Akhtar are credited) keep a lot, even the names. The Archies suggests that in 1914, a British officer called John Riverdale had founded the town Riverdale, somewhere behind the cloud of North India. Since then it has been occupied by Anglo-Indians (a smart detail that lends context to the tony accents of the actors). The dynamic among the characters is the same. Archie (Agastya Nanda) toggles between his two friends: the large-hearted Betty Cooper (Khushi Kapoor) and the rich and kind Veronica Lodge (Suhana Khan). There is Archie’s best friend, Jughead Jones (a really fun Mihir Ahuja), the strapping Reggie Mantle (Vedang Raina), the nerd Dilton Doiley (Yuvraj Menda), and the conscientious Ethel Muggs (Aditi Saigal).

They are the 1964 batch of the Riverdale High School; they drink shakes at Pop Tates and spend time cycling around the town. They go to balls and easily break into dance. The film is designed as a musical and recreates the polka-dot-aesthetic of the comic book. By doing so, it breaks the clutter of the grimy big-budget action films that occupied the Hindi film roaster all of this year. The diffident adolescents in The Archies are a departure from the hypermasculine men we were prone to witness till more recently.

If Akhtar resists from culturally rooting the characters in a more accessible setting, it is because she seeks to craft a universal coming-of-age story. In her narrative, Betty and Veronica are too close as friends to fight over a boy, a teenager navigates his sexuality with ample understanding from his friends, and Archies’ indecisiveness is treated as ignorance, prone to be reformed. The filmmaker does not reimagine as much as retell a familiar tale, training her gaze to bigger bets.

In The Archies, romantic conflict is replaced with social concerns. The problem here is not who will be Archie’s dancing partner. Instead, the film focuses on larger issues. Veronica's father, Hiram Lodge (Alyy Khan) is a wealthy man. After coming to Riverdale from London, he decides to make a hotel at Green Park, a community space each resident of Riverdale has a memory associated with. He also wants to buy out the existing shops on the main street, a souvenir of the past where Betty’s father worked in one of the bookstores, and make a commercially-driven plaza.

This act of erasing history in the name of development makes for a potent political metaphor. The film unfolds attuned to this and includes one allegory after another while maintaining a steadfast focus on the present. The implications are all there. In a post-colonial India, the Anglo-Indians are the minority. At Riverdale, the older generation comprise those who chose to stay back after independence. The city is their home. That a bigger force, Mr Lodge in this case, was bullying weaker ones into submission makes for as convincing a story back in 1964 as it does in 2023.

But Akhtar, one of the finest filmmakers of our times, chooses to tell a young adult story not just to mirror the present but also to assign responsibilities. She uses a familiar premise to convey a known tale where oppression towards the minority has aggravated due to complicity of the older generation, saddling the younger lot with the task of forcing a change. She tells the story of youth by uncovering the wisdom of the age. In the film, when the news spreads that the trees of Green Park will be cut to make a hotel, it is Archie and his friends who brave personal odds and put up a fight. Their parents do not resist because they are tied down by vested interests. The adolescents collect votes to stop the deed.

In a story of metaphors, dates play a key role. Archie and his friends were all born in 1947. They are the twins of India, much like Saleem Sinai, the protagonist in Salman Rushie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). They are offspring of those who wilfully stayed back during Independence of the country even when they had the choice to leave. So many years later, they are rendered the status of minority. Their fight then is as much about protecting themselves as it is about preserving India as they knew it. Akhtar sets the proceedings in 1964, an eventful time by all accounts. Nationally, it was when the former prime minister of India and flagbearer of secularism in the nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, passed away. Internationally, it was when The Beatles were a rage and, more significantly, the Civil Rights Act was signed in the United States which outlawed any discrimination based on colour, religion, sex and national origin. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The world of The Archies is infused with the idyllic aspiration of the moment while being alert to its fragility.

The problem plaguing the film is similar to what affected Akhtar’s previous work, the expansive new season of Made in Heaven. The politics, albeit correct, constantly hangs on the narrative. In this case, there is a dissonance between the comic book simplicity that the outing recreates and the towering problem it wants to tackle. There is an incongruity between form and theme. The picturesque world of The Archies has no villains. Even Mr Lodge comes around by the end. But this slant, adopted from the source, diminishes the stakes. At no point does the fight appear to be as big as it is because the opposition is shrunk to be ineffective.

There is also the bluntness of the commentary. The film treats Archie as a means to convey its point. In the beginning, he is depicted as any other 17-year-old boy who is too caught up in romantic impulses to be politically aware. He takes up an offer to study abroad because he is convinced that there is nothing in India. Archie is a stand-in for the youth who flaunts their apolitical stance. The film critiques them but it chooses to do it through a song where his more conscious friends sing, “You can’t live your life for kicks/Everything is politics.” At the end, he concedes, “I get it now.”

If the simplicity of the film comes across as simplistic it is because the writing is thorny. The dialogues (Farhan Akhtar is credited), usually the strongest suit in Akhtar’s films, are borrowed from WhatsApp jokes. There is a scene when Betty’s mother (Koel Purie) gently chastises her for always giving into Archie. She says, “The tingling feeling that you have seeing him is your common sense leaving your body.” In another scene, a drunk man gives a speech on his anniversary and says he always carries his wife’s picture in his wallet to remind himself that if he could survive being married to her, he can survive anything.

Then there are the actors. The Archies is the launch vehicle of three nepo kids- Agastya Nanda (Amitabh Bachchan’s grandson), Suhana Khan (Shah Rukh Khan’s daughter) and Khushi Kapoor (Sridevi’s daughter). They bring in a distinct, witless energy. Agastya as the titular protagonist is not unlikeable, except he is bland which ties into the character. Khushi, on the other hand, is adequate in most scenes but falters in the emotionally charged ones. It is Suhana who stands tall, effortlessly straddling between being coquettish and naive in a moment’s notice. She has a striking presence and evocative voice. But their personalities feel so curated that for a film on young people, The Archies does not make one miss being young.

Five-feature-old Zoya Akhtar’s merit as a filmmaker resides in the fact that no two outings by her are alike. It is impossible to look at Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Gully Boy (2019) and deduce that they are helmed by the same person. The problem with The Archies is that it comes across as a Zoya Akhtar film. The issues afflicting it are present in her previous works where the need to make a commentary hijacks the craft. Except this time they are more pronounced. The steps are rehearsed and the musical glides when it should have soared.

The Archies is now streaming on Netflix.