Verdict: Love Aaj Kal will warm your heart as you dive deep into the world of love.
What’s Love Aaj Kal About:
As the film opens we meet Zoe Chauhan (Sara Ali Khan), a modern, career-driven woman who is averse to the idea of a serious relationship as it will mess with her five-year plan to start her own event management company. Veer (Kartik Aaryan), on the other hand, is charming and has his boyish looks going for him. He is serious about Zoe and wants to go all the way with her. But, even after following her around and being at her beck and call, Zoe has to learn on her own about the power of love. Her perspective on love begins to change when Randeep Hooda narrates his love story that took place in 1990 when love was innocent and simpler.
The real problem with the film, however, is the present day track, and particularly the character of Zoe. Between the way she’s rendered on paper and the way that Sara plays her, Zoe is pretty much insufferable. One can appreciate her ambition and her single-minded focus on her event-planner career, but using a feminist argument to justify unbuttoning her blouse while going into a job interview is far-fetched. The work-love conflict that she makes a big deal about isn’t fleshed out enough to feel convincing. Practically nothing about her situation suggests that her relationship with Veer could come in the way of her achieving her professional potential. If anything Veer is supportive and devoted to the point of being a pushover.
Sara plays Zoe as high-strung, shrill, and prone to unprovoked outbursts. Zoe is meant to be complicated and confused, but she comes off as self-important and infuriating. Kartik, meanwhile, fares better. He brings a boyish innocence and goofiness to Raghu, who is experiencing love for the first time. As Veer, his body language is awkward initially, but he grows into the role of the idealistic romantic. Arushi Sharma, in the role of Leena, has a nice, likeable presence. But it’s Randeep Hooda who grounds the film in some modicum of believability. As a man looking back at his life, reflecting on his choices, Randeep brings a lived-in quality that this film is sorely missing.
Love Aaj Kal 2.0, if you like, is largely contrived and superficial. It’s a love story in search of a conflict. In that, it reminded me of Imtiaz’s other film, the polarising Tamasha. Like that film, it doesn’t have a lot to say yet pretends to be deep and profound. The filmmaker’s opinion of the millennial generation and their take on love, sex, and commitment is unmistakably patronising. The film claims to hold a mirror to modern love, yet it judges that very thing.
There is no polite way to say this – Love Aaj Kal is pretty awful and dreadfully boring. It’s also overlong and hammy. The pursuit of romantic fulfilment has seldom felt so banal. I’m going with one-and-a-half out of five.
Movie Story:
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