Movie Review: Love Aaj Kal 2

Movie Review: ‘Love Aaj Kal 2’
Rating: 2/5
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Cast: Sara Ali Khan, Kartik Aaryan, Randeep Hooda and Arushi Sharma

There’s the thinnest of lines between self-tribute and self-parody. Director Imtiaz Ali has finally crossed it with the new Love Aaj Kal.

If you had apprehensions about a brand new film being called by an old name, made by the same director, you were right. If you thought that despite this apparent lack of imagination, this 2.0 ‘Love Aaj Kal’ would fly, you were wrong. Imtiaz Ali’s latest version of romance in this-day-and-that age, is nothing but an incoherent mess.

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The film borrows the template of his 2009 romantic hit. Not the biggest of landmarks, the original Love Aaj Kal had its moments. It flip-flopped between timelines to tell a simple, coherent, engaging story.

The 2010 Love Aaj Kal, starring Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone, went back and forth in time, giving us two sets of confused lovers. This one does the same, while making an attempt to connect with contemporary ideas of love-shuv-dating-shating, as it follows the tracks of today’s couple Vir (Aaryan) and Zoe (Khan), as well as Raghu (Hooda) and Leena (Sharma), engaged in the same push-pull, in the early 1990s.

Zoe (Sara) is an ambitious young woman in Delhi. She’s impossibly fussy about her career, having mapped out specific milestones and events for her life.

Naturally, she regards love as a distraction, opting instead for casual hookups now and then. It’s on one of these jaunts that she meets Veer (Kartik) — the latest in the Imtiaz Ali catalog of men on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

A real piece of work, Veer sneaks Zoe back to his place but does not venture beyond first base. When she walks out in a huff, he doesn’t desist but shows up at her workplace the next day. 

All right, all right… here’s the deal. Zoe is a nervy go-getter; Veer is looking for his One True Love. Neither would settle for a compromise.

The film, of course, tips the scale against Zoe, forcing her to pick between career and love. It’s an infuriating false dichotomy always reserved for female characters (Veer, by contrast, is an eccentric software whiz, fluffing job offers at will). Annoyed with her quandary, Zoe forges a friendship with Raghu (Randeep Hooda), the owner of the café she works out of.

In fragmented scraps, Raghu starts narrating his story — from a time when he still looked like Kartik Aaryan, and fell incredibly hard for a girl named Leena (debutante Arushi Sharma).

In interviews, Imtiaz has defended this retread as a sort of catching up with times. Which is strange, since nothing about the film struck me as freshly contemporary. The opening sequence is a mash-up of modernity cues: graffiti, pride parade, social media posts.

Yet, once the main ride gets going, the hipness falls apart. Zoe’s overzealousness is pinned on her single mother (she has an elder sister at home, a wordless character thrown in as a personal warning sign). In one scene, Zoe, post-breakup, has a drunken breakdown. It’s a direct nod to Cocktail (2012), but with none of the emotional ruin of Deepika’s character. The idea, simply, is to reintroduce Veer as a savior.

The men quote Rumi and generally talk a lot. Yet, it’s the flashes of violence that reveal more about their characters. Both Veer and Raghu react violently in similar situations.

The trigger, in each case, is a sort of indignant masculine rage, the kind that drives Hindi film heroes to smack uniformed cops in the face. It’s another sign that for all his modern posturings, Imtiaz is a deeply conservative director, as given to filmy compulsion and tropes as anybody else. Time and again, there’s a hint of a progressive breakthrough. And at each turn, the film takes a sharp right.

Love Aaj Kal does not speak to the present. It does not speak to the past. It speaks precisely to one person: the beleaguered Tamasha fan who might just show up for a refill. It’s the unholiest of cash-grabs — and an all-time low for its writer-director. The film’s brightest scene has Zoe speaking to her boss, explaining why she has made her work her boyfriend: “It pays my bills. It’s always available. It guides me in life.” That’s some serious commitment to craft, in a film that clearly has none.