Angrezi Medium: Review

The first half represents change, the second half tradition. A couple of recent Hindi films have tried to upend traditional family structures, only to reach for the comfort of normality as the narrative winds down. Jawaani Jaaneman starts to judge its footloose forty-something hero by the end. Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan spends its second half trying to win over Gajraj Rao’s sulky homophobe. We see this in Angrezi Medium as well, though the moral pressure here is so subtle as to make the person it’s applied on think it’s her idea.

At the start of Homi Adajania’s film, we see Champak (Irrfan, back after a break for cancer treatment), an Udaipur mithai-seller, casually put a stop to his bride’s studies after marriage. The wife dies, and Champak swears that he’ll give their only daughter the best education possible. Tarika (Radhika Madan) grows up obsessed with the idea of studying abroad. And so Champak, though unwilling to squarely deal with the thought that she’ll leave him one day, starts putting together the money needed for her to go to college in London.

Though the comedy is sometimes too broad for even Irrfan and Deepak Dobriyal (playing Champak’s brother) to salvage, the first half has a raucous underdog energy. But once the trio leave for England, the film acquires a slapdash quality that suggests either a lack of time or screenwriting resolve. The brothers’ plan is laughable: team up with a childhood acquaintance they barely know and somehow make a large amount of money in a very short period of time, all the while carrying fake passports, in a country where they don’t speak the language. There’s the odd slapstick winner – Dobriyal twirling his arm before introducing himself as Saqlain Mushtaq is hilarious – but the writers are mostly clutching at straws.

The film also seems to realise after the interval that it lacks dramatic heft. And so, out of nowhere, we get Dimple Kapadia and Kareena Kapoor Khan, playing mother and daughter, facing off in an emotionally charged scene. The problem is, these are characters we’ve spent no time with, barely know anything about. How are we supposed to suddenly be invested in their damaged lives? The film doesn’t really care either; it just needs someone for Champak to be able to displace his fatherly guilt onto, since he and Tarika have a falling-out over her getting a job and saying she’ll pay him back for the money he’s spending on her fees.

The Tarika-Champak spat is half-hearted at best, and not great for the film, given Irrfan and Madan’s chemistry. With her wheedling voice, which seems to trail off towards the end of sentences, Madan feeds off Irrfan’s liveliness. There’s a scene where she comes home after drinking and manages to confuse her father into thinking that he’s drunk – which on paper must have seemed ridiculous, but the two of them make it work. That they spend the second half largely apart is unfortunate, though Irrfan at least has in Dobriyal a sparring partner in the same weight category, whereas Madan is given bland scenes with assorted college students.

At one point, Champak, hurt that Tarika doesn’t want him to stay with her, asks his daughter if he seems like a frog in the well, a square. Later, he turns her request for a little space – not an unusual demand from a teen – into an elaborate drama of sacrifice on his part. The upshot of all this I won’t reveal, but the film ends up with the suggestion that Tarika is indebted – not just emotionally but in practical ways – to Champak for educating her, for allowing her to follow her dream.

A film about a free and loving father-daughter relationship becomes a closed circuit. It’s that old cliché about setting someone free if you love them and seeing if they come back. But does Champak ever really set Tarika free?

This review appeared in Mint. It was to be Irrfan's last film released before his death.

Little Women: Review

Besides its five other nominations, Little Women is up for an adapted screenplay Oscar. That's just typical, you might think, Academy voters reserving a slot for the 19th century prestige production. You'd be wrong. Greta Gerwig’s film not only deserves the nomination, it ought to win. This is, above all, a startling feat of adaptation.

Until now, screenwriters have regarded Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel as text to trim down. Only Gerwig seems to have looked at it with a movie editor’s eye. She performs loving but intense surgery on the book, cutting and pasting and throwing its chronology out of whack. You can picture her in front of a huge board, moving around cards with ‘thin ice’ and ‘debutante ball’ on them. Not much is added, but because Alcott’s story is so familiar, the very rearranging of it becomes a radical act.

We start with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) in a publisher’s office, trying to sell the unimpressed Mr Dashwood (Tracy Letts) pulp fiction. We see Amy (Florence Pugh) in Paris – not vain, difficult Amy but a self-possessed woman about town. Meg (Emma Watson) has two little children. Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is ill enough for summons to go out to Jo, in New York, to return home to Concord, Massachusetts. In other words, we’re in the latter stages of the book. I should confess, I had a sinking feeling here. Was the film going to use the squarest of devices – the long flashback – to pack in all the Christmas mornings and theatre shenanigans, the stuff no Little Women film can do without?

There are flashbacks, there’s Christmas, but not like you’d imagine. Instead of extended stretches of linear narrative, the film flits between the four March sisters at different times in their lives, giving us fragments of story, moments out of time. Some of the transitions are achieved with such little fuss that you can barely tell the scenes are set years apart. As the girls and Laurie frolic on a beach, Jo’s voiceover paraphrases George Eliot, Alcott’s great contemporary: “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…" Eventually we see she’s reading the passage to Beth. If you’re not paying attention, it’s only a few beats later that you'll realise this conversation is happening many years later, on a different beach trip.

Other transitions are linked by emotional through-lines. Jo saying “Amy has always had a talent for getting out of the hard parts of life" is followed by her younger sister’s big scene from earlier in the book, where she burns Jo’s writings in anger, then nearly drowns when she tails her the next day on the frozen lane. A more wrenching juxtaposition is Meg at her most glamorous, at a ball in a frilly dress, and then in a darkened room, married, poor and exhausted. This isn’t your typical bildungsroman, where progress from child to adult is chronological and explainable. I was reminded of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, another coming-of-age film in which the clay, the process and the finished article are all mixed up.

This might be making Little Women sound more clever than heartfelt, but the film has an enveloping warmth. The childhood scenes are all natural light and rich shades of brown (the later years are in muted blue). Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its soul-lifting directness, brings to mind John Williams. The actors do seem a little old to be playing teenagers – a perennial problem with Little Women screen adaptations. That said, Ronan is a wonderful Jo, believable as an artist coming into her own as well as someone charming enough to attract the attentions of excitable rich kid Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and Louis Garrel’s halting professor Bhaer.

It’s Pugh, though, who executes the trickiest turn, rescuing Amy from the vain, petulant girl of the book. She and Jo are set up as contrasts, but they’re quite similar by the end, with their clear-eyed assessment of their talents (or lack thereof) and chances in life (both describe marriage as an “economic proposition"). Jo is easier to lionize as an artist who follows her dream, but the film’s bruised heart is Pugh’s Amy desiring, rejecting, then accepting Laurie.

“It would be hard to find an English-language work of fiction more autobiographical than Little Women," Joan Acocella wrote in the New Yorker in 2018. "For almost every person in Louisa’s immediate family, there is a corresponding character, an important one, in this book." As Alcott placed herself in the book, Gerwig now puts Alcott in the film. The best line – Jo saying “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe" – isn’t from the novel; it’s something Alcott wrote in a journal. The 6.6 per cent royalty that Jo negotiates with Mr Dashwood is the same as what Alcott got.

The ending is, depending on your fealty to the original text, a travesty or a genius sleight-of-hand. Jo’s plan is to have the protagonist of her novel remain a spinster. But the publisher baulks at this, just as readers badgered Alcott so much about Jo and Laurie ending up together that she created a ‘funny match’ for her in Bhaer (though Garrel is a significant airbrushing of Alcott’s dowdy academic). Jo, ever practical, agrees to the change, and we get the famous scene where she runs after the professor and asks him to stay. But is this Jo’s ‘Jo’ or is it Jo?

An earlier scene plays like the film’s manifesto, Jo giving voice to sentiments that aren’t in the book (“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as just beauty"). And the film does end with talent and ambition rewarded, with Jo clutching her newly published novel. Still, there’s nothing insincere about Jo and Bhaer’s kiss in the rain. It’s up to you, whether you want to believe she ends up with Bhaer, or that the dreamlike final minutes are the ending to her book.

With this combination of ending and phantom ending, Gerwig could be accused of having her 21st century feminist cake and eating it too, allowing Jo to be a defiantly single writer and having her marry a good-looking man who’s her intellectual peer. Would that be so bad? What’s the point of being an artist if you can’t give your heroes the endings you think they deserve?

This review appeared in Mint.

Baaghi 3: Review

When Agra’s finest, Vikram (Riteish Deshmukh), announces that he’s being sent to Syria, his sister-in-law, Siya (Shraddha Kapoor), says, how amazing, it’ll be like a paid holiday. “No, you idiot, it’s incredibly dangerous," says Ronnie (Tiger Shroff), Vikram’s younger brother. “The country has been torn apart by civil war, multiple factions vying for control, a dozen other countries involved, over 400,000 dead, millions of refugees…"

Would that it were so. Even the rocks-for-brains Baaghi franchise must know that Syria’s been devastated by unrelenting violence for almost a decade now. But it doesn’t care. No sooner has Vikram landed there than he’s kidnapped by an ISIS-like militia. Ronnie’s response, over in India, is: “I’ll wipe your nation off the goddamn map."

Threatening a violence-stricken nation with extermination is a special kind of low, but the film’s moral compass is broken in smaller ways as well. For the first hour or so, all we see is muscle-bound Ronnie swooping in at the last moment to save his inept sibling from local criminals. In one scene, the brothers plan things such that an older cop whose daughter was murdered is given a chance to shoot the killer in public, in broad daylight. He takes the shot, of course – Bollywood loves a good encounter killing – and the scene ends with violins and Shroff smiling benevolently.

The Baaghi films aren’t sequels, but they’re basically the same: someone close to Tiger is threatened, and he responds by killing his way to the source. After fighting a building in the first film and an army in the second, his enemy this time is ostensibly Abu Jalal (Jameel Khoury) and his followers – who kidnap people from India and Pakistan to use as human bombs in their own land, which seems like a lot of effort. But as the film keeps reiterating, Ronnie’s up against a country, as if all of Syria is standing in his way.

As his pairing with Hrithik Roshan in War showed, Shroff really needs a partner to liven up the dull, dutiful action figures he plays. We know by now that he can kick and dance and contort better than most, but there’s no evidence of further tricks up his sleeve (not that there are sleeves). Kapoor turns up for songs and bad comedy and lying to her pregnant sister about her husband being held by extremists.

All I’ll say about the writing is that gumrah is rhymed with Bumrah. It’s only been a month since Street Dancer 3D. If films with Farhad Samji dialogue must exist, could they at least be distributed evenly through the year?

As Shroff Ramboed his way to his brother, I wondered if even director Ahmed Khan knew why his film was unfolding in Syria. There isn’t a single scene that’s politically or culturally specific; Tiger could just as well be taking out tanks and helicopters in Lebanon, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Someone should make Khan watch Last Men in Aleppo, City of Ghosts, The White Helmets, For Sama, devastating non-fiction films out of Syria, which show a nation on the verge of being wiped off the map.

This review appeared in Mint.

Thappad: Review

It’s the scene from Awaara that modern-day viewers would like to remove a few frames of. Raj Kapoor and Nargis are frolicking on a beach. It starts out comic, then turns sexy as she dresses behind a screen. He chases her, twists her arm, pulls her to him roughly. She calls him junglee, as lovers do. He snaps, grabbing her throat and slapping her thrice. Instead of hitting back or threatening him with legal action, she grabs his leg and professes her love.

Almost 70 years later, in Kabir Singh, Shahid Kapoor slaps Kiara Advani as she tries to get him to calm down. It doesn’t dampen her love for him – she responds to his ultimatum of six hours to leave her family. Though the scene was criticised, a legion of online supporters and ₹380 crore at the box-office suggest that many in 2019 considered a stray slap a forgivable offence.

Thappad’s poster crystallises this attitude in four cleverly chosen words: bas itni si baat? – is that all? Most of the people in Anubhav Sinha’s film, built around a single slap, feel this way too, not least the perpetrator, Vikram (Pavail Gulati). But his wife, Amrita, at the receiving end of the blow, can’t get past it. Amrita is played by Taapsee Pannu, the trauma and fear perpetually on the actor’s face in Pink replaced here by a great sadness. It’s clever symbolic casting, a recognition that the difference between the violence in the two films is only a matter of degree, that “even one slap is too many" is a logical extension of “no means no".

Amrita wakes up every morning with the alarm. While her husband continues to sleep, she waters the plants, harvests aromatic leaves, grates ginger and makes tea. She tests her mother-in-law’s blood sugar levels. She then wakes her husband, brings him tea in bed. He gets ready, she makes breakfast. He’s always in a hurry to leave for work, so she runs after like he’s a school-going child, pressing food and essentials into his hands.

When we see this routine for the second time, repeated almost action for action, it becomes clear how dependent Vikram is on Amrita, and how contented she is beginning her day by making sure his day starts well. To us, the power imbalance and his self-absorption are evident, but they seem a happy couple, right up until Vikram receives bad news from work during a house party. As he yells at a colleague, Amrita tries to pull him away. Suddenly, he turns and slaps her.

Vikram’s mother (Tanvi Azmi) and Amrita’s own mother (Ratna Pathak) and brother (Ankur Rathee) are shocked, but advise her to shrug it off. For a while, she tries. We see the routine again, performed without love. But Vikram’s inability to treat the incident as anything but an accumulation of pressure on him breaks her further. When she arrives at her parents’ home one night, only her father seems to understand how serious she is about leaving Vikram. Kumud Mishra is incredible in the part, his perennially gentle tones masking the anger he feels on his daughter’s behalf.

Thappad juxtaposes the Amrita-Vikram incident with fraught relations between the film’s other couples. The domestic worker is routinely beaten by her husband; not long after Amrita is slapped, we see her slapped as well (Sinha and co-writer Mrunmayee Lagoo’s view of relationships in economically backward households as violent and doltish is disappointing). There’s adultery and a scene that borders on marital rape. Vikram’s mother and father don’t live together. Only Amrita’s parents get along, and even there it’s revealed that her mother gave up dreams of being a singer after getting married. While the writers' intention is clear, the obviousness is grating. The well-observed smaller slights – complaints about cooking, unthinking putdowns – lose their sting in a sea of injustices.

Sinha’s tendency to hammer the audience gets in the way of his narratives. As if hearing thappad every few scenes wasn’t enough, whenever Vikram says the name of his boss, Thapar, it sounds like thaapad. We’re made to notice every detail of Amrita’s morning routine fall apart in her absence: Vikram not getting his tea the way he likes it, his mother nearly dying because her blood sugar isn’t monitored, even a pointed shot of the plants Amrita used to water, now withered. There are times you wish Sinha could take some of the weight off his writing with inventive filmmaking. But he isn’t a visual director, and the 142-minute Thappad mostly has the look and rhythms of a stage play.

In the absence of brevity, there’s uncommon restraint, both in staging and performance, and the kind of quiet hurt that Hindi cinema doesn’t often access. When Amrita says “Perhaps I turned myself into the kind of the person who could be slapped," it’s with a rueful self-awareness that understands why the women in Awaara and Kabir Singh respond to violence with more love.

This review appeared in Mint.

Queering Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge turns 25 in October. If the ability to turn up in other films is any measure, then it is, by some distance, the most influential Hindi film of the last quarter-century. The heroine’s stern father not agreeing to her union, the hero turning up unannounced at her home and winning over her family—all this has been assimilated into the grammar of Hindi cinema. And the climatic train scene has been redone so many times that it’s passed into parody.

Given its status as a ubiquitous reference for heterosexual love, it isn’t surprising that queer Hindi films have also borrowed the framework of Dilwale to speak to a broad audience. Hitesh Kewalaya’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, released last week, explicitly references the film. It recreates the outstretched-hand train scene, uses the famous “Jaa, jee le apni zindagi" line, and Ayushmann Khurrana’s Kartik calls the patriarch a “bespectacled Amrish Puri" (Puri played the girl’s dad in Dilwale).

Before Shubh Mangal, the only mainstream Hindi film with a homosexual pairing at its centre was Shelly Chopra Dhar’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019). That film too used the broad beats of Dilwale. Sahil (Rajkummar Rao) initially falls in love with Sweety (Sonam Kapoor). When she reveals, however, that she’s in love with a girl but her family won’t approve, he turns up announced at her Punjab home to win over her family—just like Raj in the original, except Sahil is there as a friend. Anil Kapoor plays a milder version of Puri’s stern dad. There’s a train in the last scene. And there are mustard fields: the defining visual reference of Aditya Chopra’s film.

Dilwale’s ubiquity makes it a great reference point for Dhar and her co-writer, Gazal Dhaliwal, and Kewalya to hang their queer narratives on. Additionally, there just isn’t a tradition of gay or lesbian film that they could reference if they wanted to. Shubh Mangal alludes to this by having its leads sing "Yeh Dosti" from Sholay, a film with a friendship so deep that it could be mistaken for love. For years, gay viewers have located signs of pyaar within declarations of dosti in Hindi films. Kewalya turns this on its head: They are singing dosti but they mean pyaar.

In front of the demurely progressive Ek Ladki, Shubh Mangal seems especially bold. Perhaps this is the confidence lent by some distance from September 2018—Ek Ladki, which released five months after the Supreme Court’s reading down of Section 377, only brings out Sweety’s partner 85 minutes into the film. In contrast, Khurrana and Jitendra Kumar share a passionate kiss 20 minutes into Kewalya’s film. There’s another, more public kiss later at a wedding. Both films speak to the close-minded, homophobic viewer, but only one is interested in making that viewer comfortable.

There’s a small wrinkle in Shubh Mangal’s Dilwale referencing that’s particularly heartening. When Kartik comes to win his love back, he does so not as Raj (and Sahil) did, under false pretences, but as himself. Raj, though straight, had to hide his identity. Kartik is out, and proud.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Tabla rasa: Zakir Hussain’s new concerto

It has been a typically busy few months for Zakir Hussain. He reunited with his longtime collaborator, jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, for a revamped version of their 1970s supergroup, Shakti. He curated and performed at a musical tribute to his father, Alla Rakha. There was an exhibition on him in Mumbai, with photographs by Dayanita Singh. And now Hussain is performing a concerto for four soloists which he has composed—Ameen, Amen, Shanti, which tells the story of three priests, Hindu, Muslim and Catholic, finding common ground—with the Symphony Orchestra of India (SoI).

The concerto for tabla and three vocalists will have its India premiere on 25 February, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai. This is where I met Hussain, immersed in making a symphony orchestra, a tabla, Sufi vocals and church music sound like one coherent piece. I started by mentioning that I had been listening to his 2009 album, The Melody Of Rhythm, on the way there, which turned out to be a useful segue into the idea of composing for orchestra. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Was ‘The Melody Of Rhythm’ your introduction to writing music for an orchestra?
I am glad you heard that album. It’s an interesting one because that group— (banjoist) Béla Fleck, (bassist) Edgar Meyer and I—was the first interaction that I had with SoI. I was here for the inauguration of the NCPA, more than 50 years ago. Working with the symphony orchestra has been a great source of inspiration.

We were commissioned by the Nashville Symphony to compose a piece for their new concert hall. When it was performed, it was a big success and there was interest for us to record it. When SoI heard it, they realized this is an Indian musician involved in composing a piece that they could actually play. They could have an Indian perform and it might be of interest to audiences here. So they asked me if we could do it and they brought it here and it worked out beautifully.

After that they commissioned me to write a piece called Peshkar. Since it was premiered here, that piece has been performed in Switzerland, England, Italy, America, Canada. It’s great that SoI commissioned a piece that I wrote that’s now becoming a performance piece for so many orchestras all over the world.

Is this new concerto also commissioned by SoI?
No, it’s not. This piece is commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of the United States, which is housed in the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I was thinking about a piece that would be focused on how the world is at the moment, and the way I think it should be. What’s great about this is the involvement of Shankar Mahadevan and Hariharan and this fabulous opera singer called Kelley O’Connor. We were initially supposed to do it for one day but we ended up performing three nights in the Kennedy Center to full houses. Now, we have got to do it here and the singers are coming back.

Was the idea always to have vocals?
Yes, it always was in my head. Growing up in India, between 3-8 in the morning, I would spend two-and-a-half to 3 hours with my father learning Shiv stuti, Ganesh vandana, Saraswati vandana and how to recreate that on the tabla. After breakfast I would go to the madrasa and study the Quran, learning to recite it by memory. Then I would cross the street to St Michael’s high school, attend mass there and go to class. So in a few hours all these different ways of life came my way, and I interacted without being stressed that they were all different.

With a concerto like this, with several different instrumental and vocal styles, how do you start?
Different combinations of musicians requires a different way of looking at things. When we got together for The Melody Of Rhythm, Edgar said, how about giving us some melodies? I did; they worked on it for a couple of hours. This one line of melody became an orchestral piece.

With Peshkar, it was the tabla repertoire which was the source, visualizing in my mind how I would perform the material I learnt from my father. I laid all the tabla compositions down and then visualized how the violas would play this part and so on, and then assigned all the sections transposing the tabla bols with the melodic notes. Basically it was a rhythm piece: even the orchestra is playing tabla.

Ameen, Amen, Shanti was kind of a statement, so it had to be words. They were laid down first, and just humming the words in my head, the melodies started to appear. I am also going to write a fourth concerto, commissioned by SoI, a triple concerto again, for tabla, sitar and flute.

Did you stick to a particular raga while working on the initial melody?
When you are writing for a symphony orchestra, you have to keep in mind that their sensibilities revolve around harmonics. So you have to write harmonies, counterpoints, canons. So when you do that, it is difficult to adhere to just one raga. The harmony wants you to use four notes in one layer—not always will you arrive at a situation that only the notes allotted by the raga will make the harmony.

That’s why the tabla concerto was a fun thing to do, because it wasn’t revolving around a raga, it was revolving around a rhythm cycle. And rhythm is universal. Of course, having been brought up as an Indian some raga structures did creep in. But I did not tie myself down to their do’s and don’ts.

Ravi Shankarji, when he wrote his first sitar concerto, decided to put it into a particular raga. Later on, I was having a discussion with him and he felt a little restricted because he could not mess with the raga structures. So he ended up writing a piece that was more like the symphony orchestra playing the raga, but very little harmonic element involved. He corrected that by doing another concerto where he was able to open it up a bit more.

This is quite a time to be performing a piece about oneness...
Really? (laughs) I don’t believe religion belongs in politics, especially in a democracy. What I call Hindustaniyat—that’s what we need to focus on.

I think people just need to remember that this (oneness) was always the theme. When we embarked on our journey as a free nation, it was with that in our minds. So I am not saying anything new. It’s just for us to be able to notice it again, with a little more depth in our vision.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Love Aaj Kal: Review

All of film making is a gamble but some fights are tougher to win than others. For instance, you probably don’t want the screen to go silent unless you’re sure you have the audience in your pocket. You especially don’t want to do it in India, where theater audiences tend to regard silence not as an aesthetic choice but as a challenge.

Late in Love Aaj Kal, Imtiaz Ali kills the sound for a key scene – dialogue, score, everything. It isn’t the worst idea, but the audience I was with – college-going couples all – didn’t seem to think it was as emotional a moment as the film evidently did. There was a giggle, then a wisecrack. The sound was back in 30 seconds but that interlude felt like a verdict of sorts.

In a crowded nightclub, Zoe (Sara Ali Khan) stares hungrily at Veer (Kartik Aaryan). In no time, they’re shrugging off clothes on his bed. But before things can go further, Veer stops. He won’t sleep with her because he likes her too much. Zoe is understandably miffed. Who catches feelings on the bike ride home?

Veer and Zoe find love to be complicated, unreasonable, infuriating, tormenting – a worldview espoused so consistently by Ali that his films have started to assume those qualities. Like all of the director’s heroes, he falls in love hard – totally, tenderly, tragically, as Michel Piccoli said to Brigitte Bardot in Contempt. But she's been raised by her single mother to put her career ahead of everything else, and once she starts to grow genuinely fond of Veer, she gets a show-stopping case of cold feet.

Like Ali’s earlier Love Aaj Kal (2009), the present-day love story is punctuated with an earlier one, told to Zoe by Raghu (Randeep Hooda), owner of the co-working space she uses. It begins in the early 1990s, with a younger Raghu (also played by Aryan) in love with Leena (Aarushi Sharma). Like their modern counterparts, he’s diffident but determined, she’s forthright and unembarrassed—when they finally get some time alone and he can’t make the first move, she points out that if he just wanted to talk they could have done that on the phone. Ali doesn’t get as much mileage out of '90s Udaipur as the old-time Punjab of the 2009 film, though there’s a funny, unexpected scene when Raghu asks Leena to dance at a social: he launches into convulsive movement, and, after a beat, the stern, sari-clad Leena does the same.

Raghu leaving his job and family and following Leena to Delhi is twinned with Zoe’s guilt over turning down work in Dubai to be with Veer. Both Raghu and Zoe go into a tailspin because they’re afraid they’ve “committed" too early on in life. Both Kartik Aaryans pick a fight for no reason and get clobbered (not unwelcome). If only symmetry were a substitute for insight. People used to say Ali had nothing to offer besides ruminations on love; now even those thoughts have begun to grate. Self-regarding romanticism seems like the only card he can play. The problem isn’t that Zoe and Veer aren’t deep characters (which they certainly aren’t) or that Aaryan and Khan aren’t lively performers, but that the film treats their heartaches like they’re special.

There are still takers for Ali’s admittedly unique brand of romantic anguish. They will likely be thrilled, not irritated, that Love Aaj Kal has shades of most of his earlier films: a chattering female lead like Jab We Met; the heart-versus-career dilemma of Tamasha; the escape to the mountains of Highway and Laila Majnu; the entirety of Love Aaj Kal 1.0. At one point, Veer tells present-day Raghu, “Dil se bol raha hai, I feel it." Perhaps this is what Ali imagines today's viewer thinks of his films. Sara Ali Khan going “Againnnnnnn" is probably more accurate.

This review appeared in Mint.