Hoping against hope for Love Aaj Kal
There’s a painting in Mahesh Baliga’s show titled It’s A Normal Day, currently on display at Project 88, that shows the artist sitting with brushes laid out next to him and a largelyblank canvas perched on a desk before him. On the wall, the space for a window shows the colour bars that used to appear on televisions waiting for a signal. The painting is called ‘Trying to be Nainsukh’ – a reference to the 18th-century artist who was one of the greats of the miniature style. Judging from the canvas in Baliga’s painting, he’s not getting very far.
See ‘Trying to be Nainsukh’ on its own, and the neatly-executed painting is an amusing little work, full of self-deprecatory humour. See it as part of the series of images in It’s A Normal Day and the tone of the painting changes. Outside the artist’s ordered world is the chaos of burning tyres, dying animals, military tanks in residential neighbourhoods, and bloodred landscapes that flocks of bright green parrots seek to flee. Inside, is the artist, brush in hand.
Between the reality outside and the emptiness inside are the colour bars, which in TVS are a test to calibrate the colours being received by incoming signals before transmission. How much reality will they allow into the room and what form will it take on the canvas?
The quiet sadness of Baliga’s paintings may well fill your heart even while breaking it. That’s what it did to me, which is why I blame Baliga for the fact that I clicked on the trailer for director Imtiaz Ali’s new film, which held out the prospect of being a Bollywood love story. Especially in the present, we could all do with a little escapism to recharge our batteries.
Love Aaj Kal is a remake of Love Aaj Kal (if you’re reading this while hungover, I apologise. No, you haven’t read that wrong). The 2009 version starred Saif Ali Khan, Rishi Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, and Giselli Monteiro and was eminently forgettable, but for Kapoor’s enduring ability to light up the screen and Khan’s terrible Punjabi accent.
In 2019, Ali’s remake of Love Aaj Kal has Sara Ali Khan and – possibly because Padukone and Ranveer Singh are so far childless – Kartik Aryan in the lead roles. Unless those who made the trailer were instructed to pick the actors’ worst scenes in order to lower audience expectations, what we know for certain about the new film, which will have a Valentine’s Day release, is that it will be cringe-worthy. Some have remarked that there appear to be shades of Tamaasha (another Ali film) in this Love Aaj Kal. Others have focused their attention on making memes from the scenes in the trailer.
More disappointing than the acting and dialogues in Love Aaj Kal’s trailer is how it doesn’t make you curious about the lovers in the film. Commercial Indian cinema has an illustrious legacy of movie romance. Love stories have been sub-plots if not the through-line of most films and as a result, we’re almost programmed to feel for the lovestruck. Yet, no matter how much the hero and heroines of Love Aaj Kal mash their faces against each other, there’s little chemistry to be felt. You don’t long for these couples to come together. For an escapist romance, that’s more of an epic fail than the fact that Ali has decided to rehash his own film.
No one expects originality in romances. Not only is this genre allowed to be formulaic, but we also revel in the predictability of devices like black and white characters, and happily-ever-afters because they offer refuge from the real world with its sadness and blurred lines. Those elements are like the colour bars in Baliga’s ‘Trying to be Nainsukh’ in that they help calibrate reality into digestible, fantastical clichés that nevertheless reveal facets of how we think and what we desire.
Who knows? Maybe this time around, Ali will not write disappointing women characters who are punished by the universe for being feisty (or worse, fall in love with their kidnappers like in Highway). Perhaps Aryan will be able to pull off not only clothes but also some acting. Maybe there’s more to Sara’s character than her meme-worthiness (which has already been established). After all, hoping against hope is a key feature of the romance genre.