‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ Review

Guest article by Rambhadra

Aap Jaisa Koi sets out to explore the delicate tensions of contemporary relationships, particularly the kind that emerge when individuals shaped by vastly different cultural horizons attempt to come together. On the surface, it presents itself as a mature and introspective film about love in a changing India. But what it ends up offering is a familiar and somewhat weary parable of progressive enlightenment triumphing over inherited forms. It is an account less interested in the particularities of its characters than in the ideological framework it seeks to uphold.

(In picture: Poster of the movie. Credit: imdb)

From the outset, the film rehashes the now-standard polarity: the Bengali woman, Madhu Bose, portrayed as liberal, independent, and sensually self-aware, stands in opposition to Shrirenu Tripathi, a Sanskrit professor from Jamshedpur, cast in the mould of the emotionally stunted, morally rigid, small-town man. This juxtaposition is not accidental but deliberate; it is deployed to frame the traditional masculine as something to be corrected, reformed, or ultimately forgiven. The Bengali woman has, in Indian cinema, become the avatar of cosmopolitan femininity; equipped with a moral compass calibrated to urban liberalism.

Yet what could have been a reflective account of two traditions — one inherited, the other adopted — struggling for coexistence & compromise quickly becomes a morality tale in which only one side is permitted moral legitimacy. Shrirenu’s discomfort with Madhu’s past, particularly her history of using a sex-chatting app, is depicted not as a matter for personal discernment but as evidence of a deep-rooted insecurity. When he breaks off their engagement upon discovering this, Madhu immediately brands him a hypocrite for having used the same app himself. And the film, almost reflexively, takes her side.

But hypocrisy is not always the vice it is made out to be; it is sometimes the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Shrirenu’s attempt to find a partner through modern means is not an embrace of moral equivalence, but a concession to a world in which the older structures have broken down. His use of the app is not libertine but desperate—reflective of a man attempting to live with integrity in a culture that no longer honours the forms that once upheld courtship. Madhu’s own use of the app, and the past it reflects, along with her implicit acceptance of multiple sexual partners, is defended as “fun” and dismissed as irrelevant to character—as though having multiple sexual partners were simply a chapter in a life of exploration, beyond the reach of moral concern or judgement. This is not, it must be said, a defence of such apps or what they represent, but rather a lament for the corrupting influence of a modernity that has displaced both shame and sanctity, leaving even the earnest with no clean path forward.

The moral question that lingers. Would Shrirenu have been wrong to end the engagement even had he not used the app? The plot is such that this is a question the film does not allow us to ask. It is taken for granted that no expectations may be placed upon a partner’s past, that all judgement is a symptom of patriarchy. The subtlety required to distinguish between hypocrisy and ethical intuition is lost in favour of a more convenient narrative: the man must unlearn his values, the woman must be affirmed. In this vision of equality, only one conscience is allowed to speak without apology.

What follows is a larger pattern in the film. The story of Kusum, the overworked housewife who finds solace and romance outside her marriage is presented not as a moment of ethical fracture, but as a form of late-arriving justice. Her husband, Bhanu Tripathi, the elder brother of Shrirenu, is drawn, predictably, as emotionally vacant and patriarchal. The infidelity, on the other hand, is painted in soft tones: a woman finally taking control of her life. Here too, the film is not interested in exploring the tragedy of marital collapse or the responsibilities that attend intimate bonds. What matters is that the transgressor is justified because she transgressed in the name of selfhood.

Even more revealing is how the film treats domestic expectation. The notion that a woman might learn housework, or participate in the shared life of the home, is met with incredulity. This is portrayed not as a matter of preference or cultural continuity, but as evidence of latent misogyny. What is lost is the possibility that roles within a household might have dignity — that they might represent not oppression but mutual responsibility. But here again, the conservative man is caricatured such that it is made easier to sympathise with the wife who committed adultery.

What makes the experience all the more jarring is the casting of R. Madhavan in a role that appears beneath his standard of discernment. Known for portraying characters that embody emotional depth and moral subtlety, Madhavan is here reduced to a one-dimensional foil for liberal re-education. His character is not permitted to assert boundaries or values without the narrative eventually shaming him into apology. That an actor with his cultural capital would lend his presence to a film that uncritically perpetuates such lopsided moral instruction is a disappointment, not because one expects ideological purity from art, but because one expects complexity.

There is a sense, throughout Aap Jaisa Koi, that the filmmakers are more interested in asserting the superiority of modern sensibilities than in understanding what gave earlier moralities their structure and staying power. The film is not curious about tradition; it is simply tired of it. And this fatigue with the past masquerades as moral clarity. The result is a film that lacks the very virtues it quietly scorns: patience, depth, humility, and a willingness to live within the constraints of inherited forms rather than endlessly fashioning new ones in pursuit of self-definition.

In the end, Aap Jaisa Koi is not so much a story of two people learning to live with each other’s differences as it is a tale of one sensibility gradually subsuming the other. It gestures toward love, but offers little reflection on its moral conditions — on the duties, boundaries, and shared sense of meaning that make love durable rather than merely desirable. In reimagining tradition not as a source of orientation but as a problem to be overcome, the film abandons the very ground from which richer, more enduring narratives might arise. And in doing so, it forfeits not only depth but grace.

This is not to deny that characters like Shrirenu or his elder brother Bhanu Tripathi exist in real life. They do, and in many cases their flaws are neither trivial nor harmless. But the cinematic rehashing of these archetypes — rigid, moralistic men pitted against liberated, emotionally expressive women — has by now become formulaic. It adds little to the genre of romantic drama and even less to the moral conversation it purports to provoke. The tragedy, then, is not merely that tradition is depicted in its most brittle, parodic form, but that its symbolic defeat feels so effortless, so inevitable. When only the most corrupted version of traditionalism is allowed to stand trial, the triumph of liberalism ceases to be a challenge — and becomes instead a foregone conclusion.