3 Idiots

Rajkumar Hirani has said he could not film Chetan Bhagat’s novel Five Point Someone as it stood: the book was anecdotal and a film needs a plot. The story credit goes to Abhijat Joshi, Hirani and Bhagat. The campus material was shot at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, standing in for the fictional Imperial College of Engineering. There was a 20 day schedule in Shimla, and the close was shot at Pangong Tso in Ladakh. When SECMOL refused permission, the school scenes moved to the Druk White Lotus School. Omi Vaidya, who plays Chatur, is American and did not speak Hindi. The producers told him to stop learning it and to stop watching Hindi films, so his delivery would not drift toward Bollywood. The scene where he recites a sabotaged speech he does not understand is built on that. Aamir Khan was 44 while playing an undergraduate, and the film does not hide it. The narrative moves between a present day search and the college past, and student suicide is handled directly and more than once inside the comedy. A good fit if you can take jokes and suicide in the same stretch. Not for anyone who will resent the college scenes being cut into by the road trip; that alternation runs to the end.