‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ review: An enervating opposites-attract romance

Vivek Soni’s Aap Jaisa Koi stars two camera-friendly actors trying to pass themselves off as laggards in love. R Madhavan is Shrirenu, a 42-year-old virgin who has never managed to find a partner. Fatima Sana Shaikh is Madhu, a 32-year-old non-virgin who has loved and lost.

Neither actor looks like the sort of person who has trouble getting it on, but a movie has to be made on the opposites-attract principle, so here we are.

Shrirenu and Madhu establish a rapport despite being surrounded by the binaries that flourish in romantic dramas, if only to create false tension. He is from Jamshedpur, she is from Kolkata. He teaches Sanskrit, she, French. He is strait-laced, she’s free-spirited. It is pointed out that “if you only read Sartre and not Kalidas you are missing something”.

Their mutual passion is doused by a discovery that reveals Shrirenu’s limitations. Nobody can blame Madhu for wanting to walk away from the bookish and deadly dull Shrirenu. To give Shrirenu his due, Madhu isn’t terribly interesting either.

Writers Radhika Anand and Jehan Handa persevere, coming up with ways to flog the supposed differences not just between Shrirenu and Madhu but also their families. But Aap Jaisa Koi, like Vivek Soni’s previous film Meenakshi Sundareshwar (2021), struggles to justify itself. Shrirenu’s sister-in-law,...

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