Review: Love Aaj Kal

After giving two great & beautiful movies, Socha Na Tha & Jab We Met, director Imtiaz Ali appears to have hit a snag with Love Aaj Kal. The movie is watchable but feels heavily compromised. The romantic drama could have worked wonderfully if it hadn’t tried to be funny in the first half. Even the second half doesn’t work as the laughs dry up. We have poignant moments interrupted by touches of lets-tickle-the-audience humour, as if India can’t take a drama straight up.

Love Aaj Kal opens with a break-up - Saif Ali Khan & Deepika Padukone are parting ways with utmost cordiality, deciding indeed to have a break-up party to celebrate their rediscovered singledom. The girl leaves, the boy stays back and is then coerced by Rishi Kapoor, a genial London cafe owner, to say goodbye at the airport. Rishi drives Saif there and thrusts a bouquet into his hands, and Deepika’s delighted as she leaves. Kapoor then, on Saif’s insistence, starts telling him his own love story, and the film then narrates both romances side by side.

Imtiaz uses a very interesting device by casting Saif himself in the Kapoor flashbacks: Kapoor tells Khan how the boy reminds him of his youth, and so the Sikh Saif isn’t Kapoor as he used to look, but Kapoor as both he and Saif can visualise him as the tale is narrated. It’s a clever move even though Saif struggles rather laughably with his Punjabi early on in the film, and it doesn’t help how the narrative inevitably flips back and forth between that and the overslanged Lay’s-salesman Saif of today. A good move overall, though.

Imtiaz is one of the most promising filmmakers in the country today but his songs abruptly interrupted the proceedings which he earlier managed to weave in seamlessly into his narratives. The dialogues are still his biggest strength, but here the conversation is so peppered with Hinglish in an obvious attempt to connect with the kids that it doesn’t wash - Saying ‘aapka angle kya hai?’ for ‘what’s your angle?’ just doesn’t work, sorry.

Love Aaj Kal is a harmless, watchable film — sad, because it could have been truly special. It has its moments in the first half, while the second half is an over-melodramatic drag. Or have I missed the point, and is Imtiaz making an incisive comment on the nature of Bollywood masala, saying be it today or yesterday, our romances stay as cheesy as they are breezy?