Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani Movie Review: Karan Johar Wins Hearts and Updates the Bollywood Spectacle

Director: Karan Johar

Writers: Shashank Khaitan, Sumit Roy, Ishita Moitra

Cast: Alia Bhatt, Ranveer Singh, Aamir Bashir, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Churni Ganguly, Shabana Azmi, Jaya Bachchan, Dharmendra

Duration: 169 minutes

Available in: Theatres

In the real world, generational gaps are irreversible. Not only are we fundamentally different from our parents, we also keep leaving our previous selves behind. Neither side really changes. More importantly, neither side has the humility to change. It’s why I love the ‘transformation scene’ in Hindi cinema. The moment where youngsters get inspired by the antiquity of their predecessors. The moment where veterans and patriarchs find within themselves the courage to improve, to listen, to progress, to admit they were too rigid. It’s such pure fantasy that, for Indian moviegoers, it’s like watching an action set-piece. The action of transformation is the cornerstone of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani, a film in which two young lovers swap families for three months as a compatibility exercise. It’s designed like an exchange program: Men get schooled by women; a regressive Punjabi household gets schooled by a headstrong Bengali; brains get schooled by bodies; lust gets schooled by love; old people get schooled by young; and most of all, tradition gets schooled by modernity. It’s silly, funny, gaudy, entertaining, emotional and everything else that’s been missing from mainstream Hindi cinema in recent years.

Rani Chatterjee (Alia Bhatt) and Rocky Randhawa (Ranveer Singh) meet in unusual circumstances. She is a fierce TV journalist with an uppity mother (Churni Ganguly) and a kathak-teaching father (Tota Roy Chowdhury). He is a flashy sweetshop scion with a tyrannical grandma (Jaya Bachchan) and scheming dad (Aamir Bashir). They have nothing in common. But an incomplete love story unites them. Rocky’s grandfather (a poignantly cast Dharmendra), whose memory is fading, had a fleeting romance in 1978 with a woman who turns out to be Rani’s grandmother (Shabana Azmi). While getting them back in touch – contact rejuvenates the old man in true Bollywood style – Rocky and Rani fall for each other. Her self-seriousness is deflated by his inanity. The problem is that it’s not only all about loving your family in 2023, it’s also about making them earn that love. So instead of eloping or living in, the two embark on the three-month social experiment. More than ‘winning over’ the families, it’s about understanding each other’s ways so that the differences don’t derail their eventual marriage.