Heartbreaks are the USPs of a good love story. Add a dose of unequivocal love as the central theme and you have a story that clicks. Ae Dil hai Mushkil does just that. The time when the hero leaves with his bag, as firecrackers burst in the sky, with teary eyes and an Arijit Singh song in the background. You get the picture, don’t you?
It’s a drama minus the melodrama even with cliched caricatured characters to sell its point across. But it does succeed in telling the story in all its sincerity.
Karan Johar’s Ae Dil hai Mushkil is about One-sided love and the repercussions it can have on relationships.
The Cast includes Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Aishwarya Rai and the prodigy from across the border Fawad Khan, who is hardly there in the movie. Even Salman Khan had a bigger role in Kuch Kuch Hota hai than Fawad. But hey, whatever keeps the jingoism alive, right ?
Ranbir seems to have worked really hard to get into the introvert character of Ayaan and definitely succeeds. Aishwarya Rai brings out a good performance perhaps after ages. But it is Anushka who shines in a role with a matured performance. She keeps the story together and anchors it to make it work.
The film works because it connects with the audience by never loses its central theme of “one-sided love”. Subtlety of the screenplay reflects the emotions brilliantly. You never get to hate or root for any character but instead understand the story from their vantage points even when the lead character is of Ayan, played by Ranbir, who narrates the story. I’m glad that it isn’t pushing those views but involving you to paint the picture, and makes you believe that you’re painting your own story in some form.
You can relate to Ayaan(Ranbir) or Alaiza (Anushka) or even Saba (Aishwarya) or all of them at different phases of your life, which was perhaps how Karan envisioned the story.
The music adds to the charm of the flow of the story and the background score isn’t a hindrance to it. The dialogues, even though are poetic and include a lot of Urdu words, doesn’t sound filmy. Surprisingly.
Talking about surprises, well, special guest appearances should be expected.
However, the movie does falter in how it plans to end the saga. The way you start relating with the characters till this moment suddenly changes. It’s akin to someone taking over the steering of the car while you sit in the backseat. Of course, the director drops you at a destination, but you do feel something amiss about the way the journey ended.
Even with the few faults, mostly towards the end, the movie is a ride you should experience. It answers the questions it throws at you and convinces you of those answers as well. It is one of those movies which you’ll keep in your hard-drive to be watched again and you’d never be tired of it.
I’m going with a 4/5 for Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. It will be very MUSHKIL for your DIL to not like this.
Michael Davis
I thought that I’ve seen better than this. Though the cinematography and editing were brilliant – I thought the film had way too many songs which stretched it out to about 160 minutes. There were three separate musical pieces in discos.
Another thing that bothered me was that KJO felt it necessary to pay homage to his classic first film KKHH. It was only a brief bit of music, low-keyed and without lyrics. And it came relatively early on. But it gave away the ending of the film. I also believe that the song set in the mountains and snow and lush countrysides was clearly meant to remind us of Mukerji, Khan, and Kajol.
Of course it is possible that one might have missed that musical clue. Not so much the visuals.
Speaking of which, I also didn’t care for the near continuous music that played beneath most of the non-musical scenes. You kind of liked it but I felt overwhelmed.
As far as the actors – Kapoor, Sharma, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan were all great. But I couldn’t see Saba taking in the immature Ayan as her lover. And I also think that Anushka looked better before her extensive cosmetic surgeries.
As for Ranbir Kapoor – his work is generally pleasing. But if you ask me, I’d like to see him do more straight dramatic roles. But a KJO film is built to be a blockbuster. So there’s got to be lots of music.
This one will never hit the heights that Kuch Kuch Hota Hai did. Although according to Box Office Reports, ADHM took in a lot of money here in the USA.
Thanks for your fine review.
farooq
Thanks for reading. One of the biggest reason I liked the movie was the subject treatment of adult relationships which just doesn’t happen in Bollywood films.
Inclusion of those scenes were to stress on the filmy idea of love vs friendships, which this film tries to demarcate. The male entitlement of Ranbeer over Alizeh is something that’s so commonly portrayed as right in a lot of our films. Alizeh in any other film would be deemed selfish.
And regarding the music, it’s a Bollywood thing which is hard to get rid of. 🙂