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Join UsStar Cast: R Madhavan, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Ayesha Raza, and others
Director: Vivek Soni
What’s Good: The music!
What’s Bad: The confusion in resolving the story!
Loo Break: Not necessary!
Watch or Not?: Yes
Language: Hindi
Available On: Netflix
Runtime: 1 hour 54 minutes
User Rating:
Have you ever written a love letter? At any point in your life? To anyone? Or forget love letter to the beloved, have you ever written a letter to anyone you love? Have you ever tried talking to yourself in moments of solitude? Have your written a diary entry? Or to be specific, a letter to yourself? R Madhavan and Fatima Sana Shaikh’s Aap Jaisa Koi is the crux of a lot of these letters combined and executed for a Netflix film!
In today’s day and age, when relationships go through ten thousand stages—from speed dating to ending in a situationship—Vivek Soni distances himself from this fast-moving world and settles amidst an old colony in Jamshedpur with his protagonist, Shrirenu Tripathi, a Sanskrit teacher in a government school. Shrirenu is single, 42, and alone—despite having a best friend in Namit Das, and a friendly companion and mother figure in his bhabhi, Ayesha Raza.
So Shrirenu Tripathi embarks on a journey of finding love at 42 and he starts walking from the colonies of Jamshedpur and lands in the streets of Kolkata, bumping into Mishri Bose, a French teacher, Bengali, 32, played by Fatima Sana Shaikh. How, when and why, is where the film begins with a twist, I wasn’t expecting. As it proceeds it keeps building intrigue while penning down a beautiful new-age love story!
Aap Jaisa Koi Movie Review: Script Analysis
Aap Jaisa Koi starts with Madhavan’s Shrirenu finding love in Fatima’s Madhu. It follows the basic trajectory of love—you fall in love, there’s the honeymoon period, and then arrives the moment of truth—the moment when you realize that no love stories are about opposites attracting each other or opposites fitting in, but love is about opposites trying to make adjustments for each other and squeezing in until they make a room for each other! But here comes the main question amidst this moment of truth – is the person you chose worth fighting for all these adjustments? Worth prioritizing them above your fragile ego? If the answer is yes, then you fight, if the answer is no, you move on!
Aap Jaisa Koi begins with falling in love and ends at surrendering in love, but the story and the main crux is about choosing whether you can fight for love, or more importantly, whether you want to fight for love, while realizing if it is even love in the first place! Too complicated right? No, absolutely not, if you want to sail through love and if you understand the language of love!
Aap Jaisa Koi Movie Review: Star Performance
R Madhavan is magic on screen. Every time he tries to bring a love story, it is so compelling and convincing that you want to believe him and his struggles. Be it Manu from Tanu Weds Manu or now Shrirenu from Aap Jaisa Koi! His character intensifies, and he turns out to be a true-blue patriarch at heart. The patriarch thinks he is modern because he allows his woman to have fun, but obviously in limits. And what’s surprising is that Madhavan loses his charm and innocence the moment he turns into this absolute patriarchal mard as soon as he gets engaged to his woman! Because, obviously, now he owns the woman! It is so real, that you cannot just unsee it! As his character in one of the crucial scenes confessed, “Desh ke 90 pratishat mard aise hi hote hain, unhone yahi dekha hai.”
Fatima Sana Shaikh is attributed as Madhubala by Madhavan in one of the scenes, and I would not call it an overestimated statement! She looks like a dream as Madhu Bose! I do not know why she is still so underutilized in the industry, but that unused charm works volumes for this Dharmatic film. She looks as fierce as Madhu Bose! She has a sense of surrender despite fighting up for her. It almost breaks your heart when she looks into her fiancé’s eyes and tells him, ‘Aap bhi baakiyon jaise hi nikle.’
The entire ensemble works brilliantly and is a strong support for the film. But Ayesha Raza turns a show stealer, bringing the film together with a strong dialogue on patriarchy. She is the lost, forgotten housewife, who describes her life so aptly when she tells her husband – teen time ki dawa aur khana time pe mil jaaye to aapka dhyaan bhi nahi jaayega ki hum nahi hain. While her man asks – Itni nafrat karti ho humse, she honestly affirms – Nafrat nahi karte, bus Pyaar nahi kar paa rahe!
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Aap Jaisa Koi Movie Review: Direction
Director Vivek Soni has created such a wonderful world that I can go on writing a thesis on this beauty. It is like writing a love letter for the first time. You do not want to scribble, so you make sure before writing every word, you take your time, you build your thoughts, you decide consciously, how ich should I reveal, you make sure that you do not go wrong with the choice of words, but still you want to be honest and sincere, because its your first love letter and you cannot go wrong with it! Vivek has a sincere approach for telling love stories, he did it in Meenakshi Sundareshwar and he does it again with Aap Jaisa Koi.
He brings a new age love story, wrapped in the flavors of old-school romance, with his protagonists, being modern and new age because, that is what the time demands, but still they are believers of the old-school romance, the one that grows. The one that is sincere and honest.
Love, in Vivek Soni’s school of art, does not give you butterflies in your stomach, nor does it make your heart flutter. It gives you a sense of clarity – it doesn’t give you romance as such, it gives you an entire relationship to nurture and grow. And you invest in his honesty. Amidst all this prem-patra kind of aura, the director, along with the help of his writers Jehan Handa and Radhika Anand, builds a social commentary which slaps the patriarchal mard clan so hard that you could not imagine!
Aap Jaisa Koi Movie Review: The Last Word
As soon as the film takes a U-turn to discuss patriarchy via Ayesha Raza’s character, I am appalled and confused, and my moral compass is a bit shaken. Because at this point, while I am too much in love with this film to fall out of love, I cannot align my moral school of thought with how the film turns. Discussing this too much would be spoiling your fun, but the bottom line here is that finding a solution to patriarchy can never be justified as blurring your lines! IYKYK. Creating another problem cannot be a solution! How the writer and the director choose to break patriarchal shackles with Ayesha’s character being vocal about her choice of men is something beyond my understanding. However, the actress portrays it with full conviction!
The sad part of the film is that you actually empathize with him because patriarchy in general is so rooted in men our age that they do not even realize they are patriarchal, and when you hit them right on their face with a truth bomb, they either explode or they only explode. Because, Shrirenus do not exist in real life. In the real world, it is too tough for a man to drop his male ego and gather the guts to accept he is patriarchal! And this is where the film falls short – it is too much fiction despite creating obvious crossroads of extremes, bringing the world of a liberal class and the conservative class together.
The film creates a delusion that love only demands equality – a story about two people meeting on a sex-chatting app, not knowing each other, but the same chatting app bringing havoc into their lives because how can a woman enjoy sexting with strangers and a clear admission by the protagonist, Madhavan, ‘Aadmi aise hi hote hain.’ This one sentence keeps lurking till the end, despite the film making us believe that it has resolved the issue – but the protagonist telling the woman that he will try to be a better man, yes he will make mistakes (as grave as calling out her character) but he is man enough to say sorry! Umm, is this how we are fighting patriarchy and misogyny? I clearly have my doubts. The film leaves me hanging in between. It made me fall in love, and now I cannot fall out of it despite the red flags! Oh such is life!
I have not discussed the music of this film because it would not be justified to talk about it in a paragraph or two. Each and every song from the music album of Aap Jaisa Koi is a delight and you can read our entire music review here.
3.5 stars
Aap Jaisa Koi Trailer
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