Which brings me to the fluid identity of the director. Imtiaz Ali has spent much of his career being lauded and accused of the same thing: telling the same tale in different ways. With Main Vaapas Aaunga, however, he confronts the derivations of his own legacy. There are shades of his entire filmography scattered like ash across this movie: an eloping sequence from Jab We Met, the dual structure of Love Aaj Kal, the furtive glances of the newer Love Aaj Kal, the performativeness of love and wandering from Rockstar and Tamasha, the magic-light montages of Amar Singh Chamkila, even the Punjab-roots trauma from Jab Harry Met Sejal.
In many ways, the old storyteller on the bed is a version of Ali himself. He initially sounds like he’s deriving a greatest-hits album out of bygone truths and fictions. But once it emerges that the old man is struggling to reclaim the innocence of his past after bearing the brunt of a future, the parallels feel poignant. The film then becomes a self-critique of sorts. Just as the boy chose to numb his heart in service of a nation-shaped upheaval, Main Vaapas Aaunga feels like a confession that Ali cannot afford to create self-absorbed and designer-broken heroes who behave like they’re isolated from the planet’s problems. The dying protagonist’s condition exposes the toll of living so dearly that it would be futile to make those same movies again. The idea of romance as a bubble no longer applies; even bubbles are inextricable from the unpredictable atmosphere they float through. The character has seen too much to breathe on his own terms, which is why it takes a malfunctioning mind to revisit the sheltered kid he used to be.
As a result, the trajectory is baked into the film. The NRI grandson represents the modern drifter who fears cubicles and manufactures his own conflicts (you could make a case for how this being the weakest track is almost deliberate). The teen-aged avatar in 1947 is a vintage iteration of him. But it’s the delirious old man who represents the evolution of an Imtiaz Ali hero into Chamkila-level territory: a suitor vapourised by the pressures of his environment. In most of his movies, couples travel through places and times to reckon with their feelings. It’s the world that contains a love story. But in Main Vaapas Aaunga, the love story has to contend with the world. It’s a world in which a plea for humanity becomes an extension of a bashful proposal.
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