Review: No love lost for implausible and irritating ‘Love Aaj Kal’ remake

Bollywood is no stranger to reboots and remakes – over the years, we've seen plenty of oldies-but-goldies being, in many cases, butchered at the hands of overambitious directors who take classics and ruin them with strange interpretations. Case in point : Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag , the 2007 remake of Sholay , directed by Ram Gopal Verma, which he breathtakingly named after himself. The film, by this once-celebrated director, is widely believed to be among the worst made in the history of Indian cinema. While Love Aaj Kal (2009), directed by Imtiaz Ali, is no Sholay , and Love Aaj Kal (2020), also directed by Ali, is nowhere near as awful as Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag , the only good thing that can be said about it is that it's better than the worst the industry has to offer, which isn't really much of a commendation . There are several strange things about Love Aaj Kal (2020). While it is somewhat unconventional for a director to remake his own past hit, the idea isn't inherently without value. If you have something new to say, why not? And is there a topic richer or more universal than love? Is there a storytelling landscape more fecund than how the young live and love? Retelling his own story could have been an interesting experiment in truly mastering the topic of love . But, it's not. Love Aaj Kal (2020), unlike the original, is neither new nor insightful. All it offers is 141 minutes of histrionics, thanks to a leading lady who becomes increasingly shrill and unbearable to watch as the film chugs along, and a leading man with a stupefied expression glued to his face for the entire length of the movie. In making it, Ali not only forgot to change the name, but also the fact that a film requires a n actual script that is plausible . The central conflict in both iterations of Love Aaj Kal is the perennial tug of war between the demands of love and ambition. Both versions also boast a dreamy, avuncular character whose job is to lead the protagonists on the path of true love, using the example of their own enduring love stories. In the 2009 version, Meera (Deepika Padukone) and Jai (Saif Ali Khan) meet and fall in love, but are forced to part when careers take them to opposite sides of the world. It is all very amicable, touching and, most importantly, believable. Long-distance romances are notoriously difficult to survive and it isn't hard to imagine two sensible young people making the practical decision to part ways on a cordial note than wait until things sour beyond redemption. Also believable is the fact their under-explored feelings for each other keep resurfacing, mostly at inconvenient times. The heart wants what the heart wants, after all. In the 2020 remake, Zoe (Sara Ali Khan) and Veer (Kartik Aryan) face a somewhat similar quandary, but the details make all the difference. Like Meera, Zoe lands her dream job, but that would mean moving to Dubai. She almost gives it up, but panics at the last minute and dumps Veer rather dramatically because, as she informs us, many, many times at ever increasing decibel s, she "has a plan", and "career comes first", and she "can't balance a career and a boyfriend". That would be a believable sentiment if Zoe actually acted like she had any conviction in her theatrical pronouncements. First, she ditches her much-publicised life plan in a hot second at the advice of an unnamed stranger (played by Randeep Hooda). Then she leaves her boyfriend because she finds out love isn't as rosy as stranger-man had led her to believe. All of this while her buffoon boyfriend makes exactly zero demands of her, happy to basically double as her Uber driver. That's a romantic coup if ever there was one, not a stalemate between love and ambition. All of which is to say that there is no real conflict in the film at all, let alone one big enough to justify Zoe constantly scrunching her face up like crumpled paper and delivering her lines like she wants to grind her teeth to dust. While Meera and Veer's trajectory makes logical sense, and their motivations are understandable on a fundamental level in the original, it's as if Ali went out of his way to write Zoe and Veer as vapid and vacuous, utterly lacking in common sense. Even more infuriating is that in the three to four years that the storyline spans, there is no growth in their emotional graphs. Both Zoe and Veer end the movie as clueless as they begin it; she lacking in her ability to make a decision and truly own it, and he still the befuddled bystander in his own life . Which leads me to a perplexing question: is this how Ali views Generation Z? As moronic and insipid, unable to handle the demands of the real world, and falling apart at the seams with the slightest hint of things not going their way? Even despite making us believe that he was among the dwindling breed of filmmakers who understood the way young people fall, and stay, in love, with stirring films such as Socha Na Tha , Jab We Met , Rockstar and Tamasha ? It certainly seems that way and that, perhaps, is the biggest disappointment within the pointless exercise in vanity that was Love Aaj Kal (2020).

Review: No love lost for implausible and irritating ‘Love Aaj Kal’ remake

Director Imtiaz Ali isn’t second time lucky with a reboot of his own 2009 romance film