Aap Jaisa Koi: Sparks fly, and don’t

Cute girl, nerdy boy — could be a romcom. A Sanskrit teacher meets one who teaches French. He is a virgin at 42, she is 32 and not squeamish about her sex life. Certainly not a cute meet, but unusual enough to pique our interest. On paper, the plot makes for some fireworks. After all, what can be more fascinating than Jean-Paul Sartre and Kalidas coming together! As the love story of Shrirenu Tripathi (R Madhavan) and Madhu Bose (Fatima Sana Sheikh) unfolds, the uncommon premise holds out, but not with magic in entirety.

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The heart of the film is in the right place. It opens with a tribute to KJo’s iconic ‘dosti pyaar hai’, a nudge to the fact that the film is produced by Dharma Productions’ digital arm Dharmatics Entertainment. Like many of its films in the recent past, it wears its progressive values on its sleeve. Patriarchy is on play in the Tripathi household where elder brother Bhanu (Manish Chaudhary) is every inch a male chauvinist, demanding complete subservience from his culinary-adept wife Kusum (Ayesha Raza) and daughter, whom he constantly beseeches to learn household chores. One scene with reference to ‘silbatte wali chatni’ is a direct nod to the much-acclaimed ‘Mrs’.

If Bhanu’s actions are outright regressive, outdated beliefs of what women can and more importantly can’t do raise their ugly head in the otherwise besotted Shrirenu’s mind too. The film also raises some pertinent questions about men’s moral compass always pointing in the other direction.

Madhavan gets both his double standards and spinster act of a diffident Shrirenu, who desires female company but grossly undervalues himself, just right. One can see shades of a man next door, somewhat on the lines of his Manu in the super-hit ‘Tanu Weds Manu’ franchise. Fatima looks fetching and her unapologetic stance — “who is a virgin after 17?” — becomes her. Her fascination for Shrirenu appears a bit baffling. We are told she finds thespian Ashok Kumar hot. The legendary actor, after all, was known for playing the perfect husband and a man of principles.

What she is seeking in Shrirenu and finds attractive in him knocks down stereotypes of what a romantic partner should look and behave like. Whether he proves to be her suitable man or not, Manish Chaudhary’s Bhanu is certainly not a suitable husband. Manish looks and acts like the boor his character demands. Ayesha Raza as his cherubic and pleasant-looking wife is not just another biwi or bhabhi here, but has an independent arc of her own. Namit Das as Shrirenu’s photographer-friend Deepak, too, is an interesting aside.

Frankly, thematically, you can’t find fault with the story by Radhika Anand and screenplay with support from Jehan Handa. The problem, as was with director Vivek Soni’s ‘Meenakshi Sundareshwar’, is that even when pushed in the emotional minefield, its tenor remains tepid. The subject at hand is explosive but the treatment rather innocuous, at times veering towards the bland too.

‘Aap jaisa koi…’, the Nazia Hassan song, rocked the nation way back in 1980; here it is borrowed as the title of this Netflix film. However, it does not suffuse our hearts with the same rush of romantic feelings. By the way, ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ is not another love anthem reprised but the name of a sex-chatting app. Why it becomes a bone of contention, we won’t answer!

Should you take out time for ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’, it certainly has heart-warming moments, and heartfelt songs by lyricist Raj Shekkar set to soft melodies by Rochak Kohli. Debojeet Roy’s cinematography presents this new-age world in vintage hues aesthetically. Besides, the film makes socially correct statements. The writing has several breakthrough lines like “I am in my way, we all are in our way”.

The film, however, is nowhere close to epoustouflant, which is the French equivalent of breathtaking. By the way, that is the only new French word you will learn. French versus Sanskrit — sorry to state, there is no language war here, no linguistic sparring either.