Similarly blatant is the cameo by Shah Rukh Khan, a two-minute apologia for ex-lovers who won’t give up.Īe Dil Hai Mushkil has a run-time of 158 minutes, but there’s surprisingly little filler, and a better ratio of good to bad jokes than one might expect from a Johar film. There’s a certain cynicism involved in introducing a twist like this: the assumption has to be that the audience won’t see through the very obvious manipulation, or won’t care. Instead of confronting its central question-what do you do if the person you love doesn’t love you back?-the film sidesteps it with a shameless deus ex machina. Whether you find the latter half of the film frustrating or moving might depend on your tolerance for generalizations such as “The best kind of love is one-sided" and your willingness to see Ranbir Kapoor play yet another sad-sack romantic with the emotional intelligence of a 15-year-old. The difference is that the Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherji characters in Kabhi Alvida wanted to spend their life together, whereas Alizeh is adamant that Ayan is only a friend. You can imagine how that works out.Īfter the intermission, the film starts to resemble Johar’s 2006 film Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, with Alizeh and Ali married and Ayan starting a relationship with a poet named Saba (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan). But Ayan is such a self-deluding, self-defeating character that he agrees immediately and heads to Lucknow to try and win her back at her own wedding. She asks him to attend the wedding, a request bordering on cruel, given that Ayan has made it clear that he still loves her.
A couple of days later, she informs Ayan that she’s marrying Ali. She’d warned Ayan earlier that Ali was her tabahi (destruction) and she proves this by dropping her friend cold and walking off with her flame. Holidaying in Paris with Ayan, Alizeh bumps into her former lover, a DJ named Ali (Fawad Khan). You can see why Johar spends so much time referencing popular movies and songs: by demolishing any notion of hierarchies of taste, he makes it easier for audiences to relate to characters who are “jet plane wealthy". He plays Pyar Ka Tohfa Tera first thing in the morning-an astonishing act of self-flagellation. They head off to the mountains he sings “ae hey", she wears a chiffon sari in the snow. She dreams of a being in a teary airport scene one day. Alizeh and Ayan (Ranbir Kapoor) bond over Hindi films after their hook-up in London ends with her making fun of his kissing. You can’t entirely blame Johar, who has seen his glossy bauble kicked around as a political football, but his climbdown does feel like an acknowledgement of this project’s essential fragility that, however polished its pieces and players, it stood no chance upon encountering harsh reality.If Urdu is fetishized in Karan Johar’s film, Bollywood is as well. The message its maker issued last week suggested that this may not in fact be possible in the India of 2016, which – even before the chemo kicks in – renders the film’s questing optimism tentative at best. The movie’s message is that Hindus and Muslims can happily coexist.
Ae dil hai mushkil movie#
The real interloper’s name isn’t Khan but cancer, which proves as deadly for the movie as it is for any of its characters.Ī wider problem at this stage may be separating film from furore. Yet everyone’s solid work gets undone by a clumsily handled plot turn that suggests a failure of nerve around the central relationship. It’s Ayan’s story, ultimately – that of a big kid forced to grow up the hard way. Sharma’s terrific spikiness – neatly captured in Alizeh’s cacti fetish – draws something more resilient out of Kapoor’s generally drippy matinee-idol persona. Johar’s insider status ensures the film never lacks for dazzling distractions: fun celebrity cameos, leads with a nice, bickering chemistry. Over several years, the pair tour the continent, twirling from Parisian cafe to Viennese nightclub, with Ayan’s burgeoning singing career shaping the narrative, and Alizeh’s DJ ex (Khan) standing between the pair becoming anything more than just good friends.
This is the tale of Ayan (Ranbir Kapoor) and Alizeh (Anushka Sharma), Hindu and Muslim respectively, who meet as barhopping students in London and bond over 80s film references and their cheating other halves. What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched.
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