24 frames per second

Firstly, why the hell does the title need that extra i? Ah, never mind.

Here’s the thing, and watch out, because there are going to be a few spoilers here: A young man finds out that his wheelchair-bound mostly-mentally-absent grandfather once had a dalliance with a woman named Jamini. Turns out they had, at the very least, an emotional affair many years ago, but decided to separate because they didn’t want to break up their families. He finds her granddaughter, and the two of them get the two oldies to meet. The meeting ends with the old man getting up from his wheelchair and kissing the woman. While the old man’s wife looks on.

Her reaction is played for broad comedy. She faints, while the background music does broad comedy things.

The leading pair in the film make an unlikely couple. He’s a swaggering gym rat whose idea of democracy involves voting on Bigg Boss. She’s, well, the polar opposite, and can’t even explain to herself why she’s falling for him. The central conceit of the film is that they spend time in each other’s household to try and woo the families, and in the process, a whole bunch of people learn to be more empathetic. There’s a very well-written monologue towards the end of the second act where the hero calls this out, and he nails it. Absolutely, flat out nails it. He talks about what he grew up thinking was normal, and how everyone has a learning curve.

My problem is, did this empathy not extend towards a woman whose husband’s affair these two were getting him to relive? She is representative of the patriarchy that the film wants to dismantle, but isn’t she as trapped in a system she’s become a part of? She gets a moment at the end, but did these self-aware characters not see her as a person at any point during this entire saga?

I say this not to point out why I didn’t like Rocky Aur Rani. I say this to get it out of the way. The truth is, despite what was, to me, a big honking problem with the script, I loved the movie.

Here’s how I see it, okay? When you make a love story, watching the lead pair together should feel like watching Federer and Nadal on Wimbledon Centre Court, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on a dance floor. They don’t necessarily have to be romantic, or funny. (Funny helps, but it isn’t a requirement. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise aren’t funny.) There’s got to be some kind of rhythm. Whether they’re fighting or flirting or any other f-ing, you gotta feel like you’re hearing that rhythm in your head. (You don’t believe me? Listen to the Tota Roy Choudhry character in the film. He knows what he’s talking about.) And from an acting standpoint, there ought to be a palpable sense of joy in the performance.

To be honest, the movies rarely achieve this. Sometimes you’ll get a segment of the movie where it happens (about half an hour around the middle of DDLJ). Sometimes, you’re the supporting cast (Prakash Raj and Leela Samson in OK Kanmani, for instance), so you have to get it right for lesser screen time. Sometimes the writing is so phenomenal that it does half the heavy lifting for you (Cheeni Kum, but it helps that Amitabh and Tabu are absolutely brilliant). But to do it for a whole film, and to do it so well that you elevate the writing, and each other’s performance, every time you’re on screen — that is damn hard. Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt as Rocky aur Rani give us pretty much a masterclass in how it’s done. I’ve rarely seen a couple of actors this much in tune with each other’s rhythm.

Ranveer Singh might just be one of the finest commercial actors working today. He can do the little things as well as his contemporaries, but none of them can also do the big things as well as he does. Rocky is fun to watch but he’s a damn hard character to play – he’s a very exact combination of over-the-top exuberance and vulnerability and a bunch of other things, and it would have been so, so easy to get it wrong. Alia gets a more easily written part (in some ways, she doesn’t have to discover herself so much as him), but her skill is in making us see why she loves this guy.

The film has eight other characters — a veritable crowd — but if your movie is about winning over each other’s families, you gotta have room for so many. Not all of them are equally well-written in my opinion — the ones that really worked for me are the fathers of the lead pair — but outside of the big issue I mentioned at the outset, nobody really gets shortchanged.

My view of Karan Johar’s filmography has generally been mixed. He’s cut from the same cloth as a lot of older filmmakers, and while I respect that sensibility, and that eye for drama, I’ve also found his films to be disappointingly uneven. Still, he’s consistently knocked at least one scene out of the park in each movie, as though to remind us that he is capable of much more. This time, to quote Maggie Smith from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, he gets plenty wrong, but never where it counts. And when he gets it right, it’s something to behold.