Love Aaj Kal

An Indian film set in London and Delhi. Jai works in London. He is with Meena and the two decide to separate. The parting is friendly. They throw a party and tell their friends. The reason is simple: their career plans are in different places and the relationship is in the way. A man hears about it. Veer Singh owns a restaurant. Old, calm, and he finds the whole thing absurd. He tells Jai his own story. From there the film runs two times at once. The past is Delhi in 1965. The young Veer sees a girl. Harleen is at a college. He never speaks to her; he only watches. He watches for years. She is to be married. Veer follows her to Calcutta. In the present Jai and Meena go separate ways. Meena returns to India, Jai goes to San Francisco. Both form new relationships. The narrative shows the two in parallel. A scene in 1965, a scene now. What the narrative is interested in is not love but calculation: its idea is that the young of today place a relationship inside a plan, and that the plan notices the feeling too late. There is no calculation in Veer's line. He drops everything and goes. Jai cannot. Then he does, and is far too late. A fact arrives at the end. The story Veer told connects somewhere else. The music is inside the narrative. Pritam composed it and the album was among the best sellers of its period. The film did large business in India. Imtiaz Ali had worked the same theme in earlier films; this is the most commercial of them. He later made another film under the same title and that is a different story. Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, Rishi Kapoor and Giselli Monteiro are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Indian romance and two-period narrative. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the film is long, the tempo slow, and the crossings between the two lines are repetitive.