The K is gone, the L towers eternal. Well, the K actually hangs on, being exiled to get lost somewhere in the title's last word. The L stands for 'love', without which a gent such as Karan Johar is like a man without ambition.
NRIs, in general, have busy hardworking lives, but Johar's young pairs quietly admit their super-rich status, one step shy of Laxmi Mittal's. They don't waste their time earning money. Instead, they concentrate on serious matters of the 'dil' that Johar Logistics specialises in delivering.
Even Auckland's theatres know this well— rarely does one witness a single cinema in the city allocating two separate screens to a Hindi movie on the very first day.
Boy and girl meet in one of post-colonial India's habitually haute backyards—London's choice locales in this case. Ayan (Ranbir Kapoor) and Alizeh (Anushka Sharma) know that they are 18 years removed from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, so without dithering, they go at each other's lips instantly like wizened-up lovers. The many-splendoured fluff of their frolic, in which they paint the town red and wax dialogues purple with all kinds of witticisms and filmi references, clocks close to an hour.
Then suddenly, Alizeh glimpses an ex-flame (Fawad Khan as a Virat Kohli lookalike 'Ali' in an impressively restrained cameo) that she's unable to forget. A split looms and rankles but the twain shall eventually meet no matter the tragedies and conspiracies of fate. Strong influences from Rockstar, Kal Ho Na Ho and Tamasha abound.
Johar makes Aishwarya Rai (as poetess Saba) as visually stunning as ever, but she was supposed to come across as a temptress seductively oozing lines of killer dialogue. What we get instead is a doll spouting fancy Urdu. Shah Rukh Khan in a cameo sports eyes a tad too red to escape notice. His joust with ex-partner Saba, designed on paper as a tantalising battle of verbal barbs, appears onscreen as a school drama exchange of overwrought lines.
I was getting tired of the comedic flippancy during the first half, but a lampoon atop a snowy mountain ruptured my boredom hilariously. Many film-makers lose their chutzpah in the second half, but Johar manages a dazzling tightrope walk between laughs and romance and seriousness from start to finish.
Witness the loony triumphant way he channels Lisa Haydon in her terrific role as a ditzy dame, all the way to the weirdly wonderful meeting of two unusual heads at a restaurant table in the movie's last stage.
But the scriptwriting is juvenile in how facile a way it makes Saba cosy up to stranger Ayan. The moment when Alizeh has her first emotional breakdown after glimpsing her past is a seemingly convincing but ultimately forced scene of catharsis. Johar makes up somewhat when Alizeh superbly bares her beleaguered soul in her London flat towards the end, but overall, he still shows a fondness for the cutesy type of subtly artificial dramatics popularised by the sitcom Friends.
I will mention the absolutely dazzling Anushka before Ranbir because her smile, spunk, pathos, and poignancy shine the brightest of all in this picture. Ranbir is brilliant even with the comedic straitjacket, but when that bridle is removed, you witness a scene where the smile gently freezes on Ayan's face as he reminds the bride Alizeh where the laughs stop.
Johar proves again that he is a born film-maker, not in the bravura tradition but in the way he repeatedly replenishes the industry's coffers in his technically smooth emotional sagas tinged with cheeky humour and designer sentiments that leave you somewhere between stone-cold and genuine tears. In Ae Dil Ae Mushkil, he showcases how he has improved and expanded on his trademark oeuvre, but he refuses to lay bare the guts in making an entire feature-length movie on the lines of his fearlessly superb Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh short. That's the kind of Bombay Talkies he hasn't yet dared to be conversant with.
Rating: 3.5/5
Writer–director: Karan Johar