Love Aaj Kal

Boy meets girl. Boy and girl go out for sometime - before they separate (could be for any reason). Then love guru comes in and encourages boy to realise his love. Sometime later, boy suddenly realises he loves girl and rushes back to girl who has been pining away for him all this while. Happy ending !!

If you deconstruct any love story, it looks as daft as this. But most of the memorable romantic movies work because of their fresh approach to the same old story or some really good performances from the leads – you just have to look at director Imtiaz Ali’s first work Socha Na Tha to see how it works so wonderfully well. In Love Aaj Kal, there is a yet new approach – of two parallel love stories 40 years apart – where Saif Ali Khan plays both the male leads (after all, its his own movie – he can act in triplicate if he so pleases !!). However all the good of the script is lost because of some poor casting and trying-too-hard-to-be-cool dialogues !!

Both Saif and Deepika especially, are misfits for the roles they have been cast in. Saif looks too old in most of the scenes of modern-day Jai and Deepika just cant act much. In most of the crucial scenes in the movie – the first breakup, the second breakup and then the scene after the wedding, Deepika hardly says anything !! All that her face conveys is a bemused expression !! While Saif atleast does the Veer Singh role admirably, Deepika has hardly anything going for her except her dazzling smile and extremely long legs !

However there is some fine acting on display too - from Rishi Kapoor, Veer Singh senior and aforementioned love guru as well as Giselle Monteiro, the very pretty Harleen Kaur (you have to admire the twists of fate – a Brazilian model playing the demure Punjabi kudi from Old Delhi !!). Infact, it’s the 40 year old love story of Veer Singh and Harleen which actually rescues the movie. A delightfully old fashioned and cute love story, conducted entirely in glances and silence – wins everybody’s hearts.

Apart from the bad casting, the modern track between Jai and Meera just doesn’t have any chemistry between them. They meet, become friends, then start going out – but never appear convincing as a couple. I mean commitment phobia doesn’t need to be passionless ! Add to it the ‘cool’ dialogues – Saif tries off the Hum Tum-esque cool casual approach but his dialogues felt like he was trying too hard - he doesn’t deliver one single dialogue linearly !! And both Jai and especially Meera do not succeed in making us understand what they are truly feeling – so a lot of scenes in the second half of the movie sort of feel like a bolt from the blue.

However, even with the imperfect casting, its not as if the lead actors are without any virtues. Even if they do not come across as the perfect couple, Jai and Meera’s initial scenes have a nice joie de vivre. There is one particularly engaging scene immediately after the breakup where they tell each other what they didn’t particularly like in each other. And the interactions between Saif and Rishi Kapoor are also very likeable.

The songs, while likeable, are not placed perfectly and the Twist song particularly feels out of place.

So even with a perfect team (directors/actors), Love Aaj Kal falls well short but not disastrously so. And the older love story will surely have you smiling, especially at their last scene together (where we see the older Harleen). Watch it only if you have to claim I-watched-it-too