Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat movie review: Anurag Kashyap returns to familiar ground in this political and sharp film

The cutting back-and-forth could have turned into a contrivance, but it works both because of the similarities and the differences in their situations. Amrita’s middle-class family — grandmother, mother, father and brothers — is the kind of microcosm you will find all over North India. For a young girl to even talk freely with a boy who doesn’t belong to her family, let alone caste or religion, is a sin. Still, in 2023. As is same-sex love. Homophobia weighs heavily on family ties, and that’s not either region or religion-specific.

Not that class makes a difference. Despite being super-wealthy (a chauffeur-and-car is always close by, and clearly she has no dearth of plastic money), Ayesha is as much a prisoner of her overbearing father as is Amrita, on the other side of the world. What makes the film interesting is the manner in which the young women are shown to be naive and confused, and deeply self-obsessed, and consequently, dangerous. They want what they want, and to hell with the consequences, which are heaped upon the young men, with disastrous results.

There are loose threads that are left to dangle. Some characters just vanish, and you wonder why: a case in point is Ayesha’s older, worldly-wise companion who disappears without a tangible reason. The track of a predatory character in Harmeet’s life trails off. Some portions feel flat and derivative: a take-off on a real-life burqa-clad stand-up comic, which takes up considerable screen space, flattens the narrative. And the very likeable Kaushal’s role feels like an extension of his DJ Sand in ‘Manmarziyaan’, with Amit Trivedi’s music not as joyous or effective as it was in Dev D.

But Kashyap’s singular ability to show us the dark side of putative romance — the ‘almost pyaar’ of the title — rescues the film, and tilts it back on its axis. This is a story worth telling. Alaya F, who is a couple of films old, and debutant Karan Mehta play the two sets of youngsters, and manage to pull off the difference in body language, as well as the language they speak. Both are impressive, despite a few fumbles. And despite, or maybe because of its straggly shagginess, I really liked the film.

The usage of an ugly phrase like ‘love jihad’ has been so normalised that you forget how it can be weaponised, or how thoughtlessly and effortlessly a heavy-handed patriarch can ruin a young life. Can love push back hate? That’s at the core of the film, and it’s a question worth singing out loud.

Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat movie director: Anurag Kashyap
Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat movie cast: Alaya F, Karan Mehta, Vicky Kaushal
Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat movie rating: 3 stars