Aap Jaisa Koi Movie Review:
Love isn’t just soft hues. It isn’t perfect frames or choreographed steps or a production design that screams nostalgia. Netflix’s Aap Jaisa Koi, however, is convinced that’s all there is to it. The May-December romance, starring R Madhavan and Fatima Sana Shaikh and helmed by Vivek Soni (Meenakshi Sundareshwar), operates in a magic dreamland where even a mosquito net can be an aesthetic. Where an intimate-chat app doesn’t have ads, a 42-year-old virgin can get an early 30s woman and where Bengalis refuse ilish (at least initially). Ok, that’s a nightmare.
Director: Vivek Soni
Cast: R Madhavan, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Ayesha Raza, Manish Chaudhari and Namit Das
Streamer: Netflix
The virgin in question is Shrirenu Tripathi (Madhavan), a Sanskrit adhyapak (teacher) in a Jamshedpur school. Shrirenu hasn’t had it ever, courtesy of a curse by a girl in school after a failed proposal. Decades later, he lives with roommate and friend Deepak (Namit Das) and talks about his loneliness to a caged, single rat (There’s a metaphor here, as straight as a road through a desert, so I will not get into that). Deepak introduces Shrirenu to an intimate-chat app called Aap Jaisa Koi (“AJK for short”) and even when his idea of dirty talk is asking a girl if she had dinner, he still manages to get talking to one late through the night.
Soon after, he gets a marriage proposal. A 32-year-old chiffon saree-swaying Madhu Bose (Fatima) is interested. Madhu is modern, independent and free-spirited, and if that is not Bong enough for you, she is also a teacher of French. A professeur de français. Madhu and Shrirenu fit like a hand in a mitten. They both prefer tea over coffee, have dates on a bench by the riverside and grab popcorn at a Kishore Kumar film festival. She even thinks Ashok Kumar was hot. It can’t get better than this.
After boy meets girl, it’s time for the second stage of love: family meets family. The Tripathis are a patriarchal lot. Shrirenu’s elder brother Bhanu (Manish Chaudhari) is in the real estate business and treats women too like property. His wife Kusum (Ayesha Raza) feels neglected while daughter Nisha (Shriyam Bhagnani), although qualified, has to be at the receiving end of sexist instructions. The Boses, on the other hand, are Dharma’s version of a Bengali family, full with sitar-teaching grandmother, office-going women and closeted-writer uncle. Bhanu is judgmental of the Boses’ modernity, but it isn’t much of a hindrance and the couple gets engaged. On the day, however, Shrirenu gets a surprise which could have been seen from miles before. Madhu is the same girl who was moaning his name on the app. Although liberal in mind and pookie in mannerisms, Shrirenu might have some red flags in his spirit.
Aap Jaisa Koi is Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) set in nostalgia-coded Kolkata with a sprinkle of Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and a central conflict that is more fitting in an Ayushman Khurrana comedy. It’s an assembled film, packaged and presented with soft lighting, synchronised frames, and songs which could be earworms if listened to twice over. Its problem is that it is scattered. More beauty than substance, more elegant than evocative. It doesn’t want to get into the messiness of love, lest it spoils the film’s aesthetic. After the Tripathis find out about Madhu’s previous explorations on the app, they storm into a hotel hall to have a talk with the Boses. What transpires isn’t a shouting match but an audio-free dance of comically aggressive gestures with gaping mouths. It’s like watching a silent film on the lives of a bunch of opera singers.
The film says things but they aren’t revelatory. It is a rehash of what is becoming Dharma’s brand of questioning the sacrosanctity of the family setup and the male privilege, whose base it set up in films in the early 2000s. I am all for the messaging but it often feels force-fitted and didactic. Madhavan and Fatima, however, pair-up well and have bouts of bubbling chemistry and the supporting cast is competent. It’s just that Aap Jaisa Koi sets up a lot of things and then wraps them up rather easily. But then, I don’t completely blame them. Love might be a forbidden fruit, but endings are definitely one tough nut to crack.