Love Aaj Kal

LOVE AAJ KAL is passionate, but flawed and overindulgent!

A classic case of Imtiaz Ali getting carried away with the philosophical side of his craft, LOVE AAJ KAL is an extremely indulgent ode to love and its complexities. If you are able to connect with what it says, you’ll absolutely love LOVE AAJ KAL, but if you don’t, you’ll be bored to death. Decide if you’re ready to take that risk. Warning – It’s NOT a light watch!

Spanning from 1990 to 2020, the movie portrays two love stories from widely different eras facing widely different obstacles. One couple battles society’s restrictions while the other must learn to balance work with love, but both portray the same true and unfiltered feelings of love.

Writer/Director Imtiaz Ali is widely alleged for recycling his own scripts over and over again. This time it’s no different. You yet again have a passionate love story in which the characters are discovering themselves through various complexities that life throws at them. However, usually, his films start off on a light note, with a breezy first half, which gradually, in the second half, dives into extremely deep ideas of finding oneself through love. This time around, LOVE AAJ KAL 2020 is complex right from the word go. Light moments are hard to find, and the film has a ‘funda’ plugged into every scene.

Imtiaz Ali voices his ideas in the most passionate style of storytelling, not fearing the fact that it may venture into the zone of inaccessibility. Now this is something which will connect with only a few romantics. Understanding this film isn’t a function of your intelligence, but your relatability to the subject it preaches. So LOVE AAJ KAL will definitely end up having very few takers. I liked the film because I followed it from start till the end and it resonated my feelings about the idea of love as a quest for happiness. The characters were messed up, hence not universally acceptable.

The final 30 minutes of the film however are a real drag. Meandering for no reason, the climax is held up for irrelevant drama. The music is soulful and visually the film scores really high. Production values are always high in an Imtiaz Ali film, and LOVE AAJ KAL is no exception.

The acting department is a mixed bag. Kartik Aaryan definitely gives his best here, but I wonder why he plays his AAJ character as if he has Asperger’s syndrome. Perhaps that was the only way for him to emote genuinely. The finesse is missing, but he does a much better job than usual. Sara Ali Khan is charming onscreen, but hams for the most part. She lacks the polish of a fine actor. Randeep Hooda is the star here. His performance is as natural as it gets. You feel his emotion with each dialogue he delivers – true mark of a seasoned actor. Newcomer Arushi Sharma does a good job of whatever little is asked of her. All others are passable.

To sum up, LOVE AAJ KAL is a film which is an extreme work of art, which will have more haters than lovers. But the reactions will also be extreme – extreme love or extreme hatred. Possibly the most inaccessible film of Imtiaz Ali till date. While I personally really liked this film, I’m taking the easy middle path to rate this film, to avoid my romantic biases take over the pragmatism of a film critic!