I am a sucker for love stories. So Imitaz Ali’s new summer flick Love Aaj Kal didn’t have to be a revolutionary, insightful or different. As a genre-aficionado of the feel-good love story, give me a half-decent soundtrack, competent acting, and oodles of chemistry and I am already in love. As a romantic, I love the opportunity to indulge in cinematic escape from the persistent state of mid-life with my two kids in suburbia.
Unfortunately in Love Aaj Kal there is not much love between the sexy aaj and the sepia-toned kal.
Loves stories can explore so many possibilities: life-long friends who don’t realize they are soul-mates, two people hating each other only to discover surprisingly we don’t know love until we confront what we loathe, instant connections that defy practicality or a friendship that becomes bigger than its definition. There are so many angles and directions and nothing inspires more insight or entertainment than two people exploring common ground without a damn reason.
But once the couple confronts the overwhelming formality of Hindi movie love and the undeniable magnetism of physical attraction there is no going back to the before and certainly there is no hope of casual indifference.
Chemistry just can’t be hacked and the main loophole with Love Aaj Kal. There is no inexplicable chemistry between Love Aaj Kal’s hero and heroine despite looking fantastic and living so trendy.
This story starts between an already hipster couple Jai (Saif) and Meera (Deepika). Jai and Meera enjoy a youngling couple’s life in London: party, drink, make-out and dream about their prospective careers. Until Meera’s career as a restoration artist demands a move to India.
Early in the movie, Jai makes it clear, marriage has no future in his life but the moviegoer has no inkling how Meera feels about anything, marriage or her relationship with Jai. She is so ambivalent to their relationship that it left this moviegoer believing that Jai and Meera are really just having fun, the no strings attached kind (not that there is anything wrong with that either).
Jai wants to break up and Meera obliges like a good sport agreeing that marriage is for dorks and long distance relationship is bereft of any benefits. Ingeniously Meera and Jai host a break-off party with their large group of equally hip, trendy good-looking friends (none relevant to Jai, Meera, or the storyline).
A bye-bye party, a hug, and adios amigo, just like that Meera and Jai decide their relationship of two years has run its course and off they go into the world in different directions deciding to stay friends.
Thats the beginning of the movie: Jai and Meera break-up without the drama. Enters Veer (Rishi Kapoor) playing an adorable, extroverted spirited coffee bar owner who befriends Jai because he sees a younger avatar of himself in Jai and soon Veer and Jai share perspectives of love. Veer’s extracts of his heady days in love at first sight in the sixties of Old Delhi to a woman he sees but has never spoken nor touched. And Jai’s two-year ex-romance with a woman he has practically lived with and voila, they map their beliefs in a narrative that is the backdrop of Love Aaj Kal.
The direction is cute as Veer’s telling of story unfolds with Saif playing a younger Veer in the 1960s and then mapping it to what happened or is happening between Jai and Meera (who despite having broken up stay in touch and counsel each other in relationships with other people).
Will Jai realize what love means? Does Veer ever win his forbidden love in the lesser permissive times of history? All this unfolds as the plot of the movie goes between Veer’s story set in the 1960s and Jai’s in modern times.
Saif plays a competent hipster and a commitment phobic male reduced to a stereotype. We have met a Jai before, in real life and so often in cinema (he seems a cliche) and Saif plays the character true to the lines minus any complexity or dimension.
Deepika is just horribly rigid. Let’s just say Deepika can’t act because her dialogues, her presence, her dancing doesn’t fit the laid back Meera (my husband’s antics qualify him to be a thespian compared to Deepika’s coldness). Deepika suffers from model-made-only syndrome, she looks good but as soon as she opens her mouth the entire personality crashes. Deepika just can’t pull of an artist like Meera and as a result Meera’s personality never translates to the audience.
The script just doesn’t establish her character either. We just don’t know what Meera wants or the degree of her confusion. Does she want love or marriage or even Jai. Meera as a charcater is exists to give Jai a chance at realizing love on his own schedule.
Rishi Kapoor aaj aur kal is still the only lover boy if one is to judge by this movie. I mean even in a love story where his younger self in flashback is played by Saif he manages to steal the show. The Kapoor boy still has je ne sais quoi and his role is the only part of the story that evokes any trace of love in this story.
The script has it’s moments of fun and works to keep the narrative flowing.
The song sequences are forced even under Hindi movie norms they just irritate except possibly the track Chori Bazaar with its catchy composition and spontanteous apropos inclusion.
Overall the movie is okay. I was as ambivalent about the movie as the main characters are about being together. I frankly didn’t care if Jai and Meera made it to the altar or to Harrods for shopping.
If you have ever been in love, you know how incredibly free-falling and hard-hitting the experience. I have been in love, madly, crazily in that I will be 22-forever-kind-of-way and let me tell you love as a crush, unrequited, consummated, or otherwise has nothing to do with being practical.
My husband, always playing the devil’s advocate tried to make a case for modern love as depicted in this movie, his point being that modern love is practical laid-back since society has becomes more permissive, less judgmental. Hmmm, I don’t know if modern love is analogous to a stock transaction but if that’s the case, like Veer, I will constantly date myself when talking about love, old school.
Minus the soundtrack, high definition video, hipster hoods and homies, 12 years, two kids, there is still more chemistry and passion in my persistent state of mid-life than in Love Aaj Kal.
