The theme from Kal Ho Na Ho plays at one point, It’s the Time to Disco at another. Within the first 10 minutes, three of his films are referenced. Her lovey-dovey scenes with Kapoor are a train wreck, though for sheer awkwardness it’s difficult to beat Johar determinedly celebrating his own career through the course of the film. Rai, though, struggles to give her character definition it’s ironic to hear Saba say that beauty fades while personality persists beyond the grave, given that the actor has always had too much of the former and very little of the latter. Lisa Haydon has an entertaining cameo early in the film as Ayan’s girlfriend, and there were audible sighs when Fawad Khan turned up onscreen.
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. If Urdu is fetishized in Karan Johar’s film, Bollywood is as well.