The Cinema of Friendship Is the Gag of 'Madgaon Express'

I moved to Mumbai in early 2002. At first, I struggled to acclimatise. So whenever I visited my hometown, I was always going back: to childhood buddies, to comfort zones, to familiar tastes and smells. The reality of my old friends became my escape. The second I’d arrive, we would recreate the world from my rearview mirror – the same banter, drives, stories and cafes. For them, I was the cool big-city kid. “Don’t forget us,” they would say half-jokingly.

Around that time, Dil Chahta Hai was a cultural moment. Farhan Akhtar’s modern-day classic had altered the cinema of friendship. An entire generation of urban Indian teens embraced this new vocabulary of male bonding. Personally, I saw myself as a hybrid of Akash’s circumstances and Sid’s personality: the homesick one and the sensitive one. Most kids aspired to be those two. Their main-character energy was irresistible. They had the drama, the spat, the contrasting outlooks. But almost nobody idolised Sameer. The goofy Sameer was little more than the “middle friend,” a figure sandwiched between two budding protagonists. Characters like him were usually the connective tissue in a conflict: the low-stakes human stranded between heroes.

Over the next decade, Mumbai became my home. I made new friends in college. I met new people. By the time Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara released in 2011, I felt like all three characters at once. But I also started to identify with the unglamorous middle friend. Here it was Kabir (Abhay Deol), a bridge between the two floating islands of Arjun (Hrithik Roshan) and Imraan (Farhan Akhtar). I was the cricket enthusiast caught between two rival football fans; I was the teetotaler between two booze-loving bikers. But it wasn’t just that. Most of my friends soon left to study or work abroad. When they’d visit for the holidays, I became the unifier of egos and memories. I became their connection to a shared past. Like Kabir, who is the one insisting that the three friends honour the long-standing pact of a road trip. It’s his sense of solidarity that brings them together after years. I liked that Kabir had a little more agency than Dil Chahta Hai’s Sameer. He was more discernible, not just a comic-relief device. In fact, after Arjun and Imraan patch up, they turn their attention towards him.

There is a geometric simplicity to the middle friend in these movies. Men like Sameer and Kabir are the mid points in a straight line – equidistant from two corners in every manner possible. They’re empathetic towards both ends because they can relate to neither. They are so culturally comfortable – their family and professional lives so sorted – that girl problems are the only problems they are afforded. Meanwhile, the other two friends are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Akash is the heir to a corporate empire and Sid is an artist in a single-parent household; Arjun is a hotshot London broker and Imraan is an artist in a single-parent household.

This structure extended to most fictional trinities of the time. In dramas like Kai Po Che!, the differences are political: Aspiring cricketer Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Hindu extremist Omi (Amit Sadh) clash over their worldviews, while Govind (Rajkummar Rao) is the geeky guy with – you guessed it – a girl problem and no defining political views. The middle friends in such stories were defined by their social diplomacy. I related to them not only because they were relatively less complicated but also because they were the unsung heroes of friendship. It just felt easier to be (like) them.

Over time, though, something about being the middle friend seems to have changed. The social media age slowly dismantled its equanimity. The sheer visibility of lives on the internet made these bonds more relative. It became more about seeing others go ahead or behind. The sharing of experiences became more literal and validation-driven; every new post created the illusion of vertical motion. As a result, the once-straight line is now an inverted triangle: the middle friend tends to be isolated at the bottom rather than bridging two sides. I used to look sideways, but now I find myself looking upward. I see those friends build new lives in distant time zones: buying homes and cars, having babies, travelling the world.

It’s hard to address this in mainstream cinema. For starters, it would require the acknowledgment of this inconspicuous character. So imagine my delight when I watched Kunal Kemmu’s directorial debut, Madgaon Express, earlier this year. The narrator of the film is the middle friend named Dodo (Divyenndu), the flightless and not-very-smart friend who’s left behind in Mumbai. Dodo is all kinds of unstable: frequently jobless, staying with his father, faking an elite life on social media and perpetually living in the past because his future never took off. His two childhood friends Pinku (Pratik Gandhi) and Ayush (Avinash Tiwary) don’t come to him, they come back to him. They’ve moved on to find success in Cape Town and New York. But his decisions – good, bad, worse – drive the adventures of the gang. It’s his perspective that shapes the story.

It’s a natural progression for Excel Entertainment, the production house behind both Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Madgaon Express is a perceptive buddy comedy because it’s about three characters who’ve watched too many buddy comedies. Dodo, Pinku, and Ayush literally grow up in the age of Dil Chahta Hai. So the Goa trip that the teenage trio initially dream of is a mythical coming-of-age journey. But life keeps happening to them while they’re busy making Bollywood-sized plans. The Goa trip that the adult trio eventually take is a cocaine-fuelled, gangster-filled, Hangover-styled romp.

This revision of the syndrome, where the middle friend is suddenly the explicit point of view, feels personal. Director Kunal Kemmu has always been a talented actor – he started as a child artist in the early 1990s – but he never quite transcended the tag of a comic performer. One might argue that his lack of success as a lead actor kept him grounded and refreshingly familiar. One might also argue that his journey evokes an image of being left behind by peers and friends. This is evident from his tongue-in-cheek interviews and anecdotes about his middle-class upbringing in Mumbai’s Mira Road as well as marrying into the illustrious Pataudi family (translation: the film closes with Dodo winning the lottery). This humility is at the fore of his film: Dodo is a surrogate for Kemmu himself. Consequently, he speaks to lived-in ordinariness and practical incongruities that most buddy movies are too aspirational to explore.

When my friends visit nowadays, my identity is no longer that of a mediator. Like Ayush and Pinku, none of them have beef with each other. So I end up camouflaging my urban-poor lifestyle and loneliness behind routines of remembrance. I conceive low-budget strolls down memory lanes – town crawls, college reunions, cheap bars, vintage bakeries, and Irani cafes. Even when we do Goa trips together, nostalgia is our only currency. Despite their noble intentions, the gap is felt in the most unassuming gestures – like a three-way splitting of a lopsided bill, the lack of an interest in my career, or the renting of a car instead of a scooter. When they leave, it’s almost like they are going to a better place; I go back to scrolling through their social media feeds and padding up my own.

The conceit of the film too is that Dodo plans the boys’ trip on a shoestring budget to hide his own middle-class reality. Goa is Dodo’s belated attempt to erase the triangular gap and level the field. It’s his last-ditch shot at reliving a phase when things like money, ambition, and experience couldn’t disrupt the straight line of friendship. He feels responsible for them because they are travelling on his terms; they are on his social turf. Like a needy host, he keeps checking if they’re “enjoying no?”.

The repetitive plots involving the middle-friend character feature templatized road trips, reunions, spontaneity, and brief rebellion. But, in the age of Instagram, life itself is a template. The two main characters on either side of the middle friend speak, today, to the hollowness of this template rather than the flexibility of living. In many ways, it’s the middle friend that allows us to ask: What experiences are worth canonising? His existence not only removes the fancy filter, it eliminates the lens altogether.

Consider the first friend I made in Mumbai. Before any of us owned a mobile phone, his beloved digital camera documented our college days. We’d tease him for his trigger-happy ways; for inventing the selfie before the world had heard of it. But I only noticed later that very few of those photographs were of lofty milestones. They were the in-between moments: walking, thinking, eating, studying. He never failed to “capture” us, almost as if he was more attuned to life happening in the middle.

And so, towards the end of Madgaon Express, I felt a lump in my throat. It’s not just because Dodo finds acceptance – and closure – as the flawed middle friend. It’s also because I was reminded of this friend, who never made it seem like he was adjusting to my life on his quickfire Mumbai trips. His curiosity felt genuine. If anything, he dragged me to my favourite spots. I was seldom a gateway to his past; I was simply his person. In his pictures, I felt visible. He didn’t make me feel like writing was a lesser job. He even expressed envy for my life and career choices. Consequently, the Dodo in me went extinct: I never needed to pretend in front of him.

When he died last year, they say he went to a better place. I’ve been left many things since: rudderless, heartbroken, angry, selfie-less. But I’ve not been left behind, because with every passing day, it feels like I’m the one moving forward. He took my condition of middle-ness with him. I scroll through his social media feeds every now and then; he’s the same but I’m not. Ironically, I realised this while enjoying a comedy named after a train that connects two different destinations. Maybe it’s fitting. After all, trains come and go but it’s the platform that remains. Movies like Madgaon Express not only humanise the middle friend, they erase the grief of being one.