Love Aaj Kal

As is usually the case with a contemporary Hindi movie, you lower your expectations and buy the tickets. This trick doesn't seem to work for Love Aaj Kal because you just cannot lower them enough. Movie jump-starts with a simultaneous beginning of love story (which is shown in fast-forward) and a definite sense of impending doom. The dialogues are utterly disconnected and there seems to be no effort to develop characters. You will require neither genius nor time to discover that the actresses are acting-impaired. Unknown characters will pop up left and right making the storyline unnaturally difficult to believe in. Extreme jerkiness is an artistic liberty that has been profusely used through out the movie. The director does not go easy on clichés either.

You would soon realize that the movie's aim is to show that love transcends pragmatism and rationality and that the director has forsaken both of these for the purposes of movie-making. From time to time, you hope against your better judgement that this unbelievably superficial grief acted out by the characters would make one of them a psychopathic killer, and that somehow it would be you who is the victim of a horrendous crime. Hope all you want, 'cos that just ain't gonna happen. There will be times when you would see the movie taking a turn towards the finish line and just when you've started to believe that the end is near, the director plays a cruel trick on you. At such a point, the coincident vocal expletives from the audience would remind you that you're not alone. Hopelessly incurable romantics could choose to ignore these, of course. So I sat in the dark through 2 hours, 40 minutes of pure awkwardness, all the time imagining how dumb did the director expect you to be in order to appreciate this movie. Songs were neither melodious nor memorable; but enriched with techno sound effects, they were definitely a relief from the dialogues at which, of course, a ten-year-old could do a better job.

Needless to say that sitting through it till the end to recover my hard-earned $10 was a lost cause. And after a lot of soul searching, I reckon it was probably guilt of doing something terribly awful which made me sit through the entire thing. I would say go watch the movie, especially if you believe in karma, because you will have to pay less for your sins after you've been through this version of hell.