Aditya Roy Kapur’s hair in the first twenty minutes of Daawat-e-Ishq looks like it fought a ceiling fan and lost, which is a choice someone made in a trailer somewhere outside Hyderabad and nobody bothered to fix before the camera rolled.

That kind of scruffy, low-budget indifference hangs over Habib Faisal’s romantic comedy like the exhaust fumes of a Lucknow auto-rickshaw, pulling you in even when the plotting gets awfully thin and repetitive. It’s a movie about biryani and extortion, two things that rarely share screen time without someone looking deeply uncomfortable, yet the director treats both with the same greasy, affectionate eye he brought to Do Dooni Chaar.

Parineeti Chopra plays Gulrez, a shoe-sales girl from Hyderabad with a sharp tongue and a pile of debt she inherited from a father played with warm, shambolic charm by Anupam Kher. She decides that filing a fake dowry case against some wealthy groom is her best ticket out of financial ruin, which is an intensely cynical premise for a YRF romance that wants us to believe in true love by reel four. She wears kurtis that look like they were bought on sale at a local bazaar, and she speaks with a Dakhini accent that wobbles whenever she gets genuinely angry, dropping the local cadence entirely to sound like a thoroughly annoyed girl from Mumbai.

When she meets Tariq, played by Kapur with the kind of dopey, earnest enthusiasm usually reserved for golden retrievers, the script has to work overtime to keep them from figuring out her scam in the first act. Tariq is a Lucknow cook who makes food that practically steams off the screen, and Kapur plays him with a permanent glaze in his eyes, as though he’s perpetually half-asleep from too much oil and carbohydrate. There is a scene where they sit in a Lucknow food stall eating kebabs that are so heavily saturated with grease you can almost feel your own cholesterol spike just watching them chew, and the camera lingers on the chewing for just a fraction of a second too long, testing your patience.

The cinematography by Himman Dhamija has this yellowish, sun-baked glaze that makes everything look slightly dehydrated, like an old postcard you found in the back of a junk drawer. It doesn't have the glossy, expensive sheen of contemporary Hindi movies, but it captures the gritty texture of real streets, real dust, and real grease. Sajid-Wajid’s music, on the other hand, is mostly forgettable background noise that pounds away during chase sequences and emotional montages, save for the title track which has a certain bouncy idiocy that stays in your head long after the screen goes black.

Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to marry the culinary arts with romance, usually resulting in glossy nonsense that looks like a high-end restaurant commercial, but Faisal is more interested in the sticky floorboards of cheap eateries and the desperation of people who count their rupees before ordering a plate of biryani. It’s the rare Bollywood film that actually acknowledges the sheer cost of living, even if it wraps that realization in a ridiculous plot about legal loopholes and fake dowry harassment. The social commentary is clumsy, crashing into scenes without warning, but you can tell the writer actually spent time talking to people outside the bubble of suburban studios.

Chopra carries most of the heavy lifting here, injecting a jagged, prickly energy into scenes that would otherwise dissolve into syrup, reminding you of the fierce screen presence she had back in her Ishaqzaade days before her choices got weirdly predictable. Kapur is mostly just along for the ride, a human prop with good bone structure and a winning smile who knows how to stand near a tandoor and look hungry. Their chemistry isn't electric, but it’s comfortable enough to sustain a runtime that outstays its welcome by at least twenty minutes.

There is a courtroom sequence near the end that feels like it was written by someone who read about the Indian legal system on Wikipedia during a ten-minute coffee break, resolving every moral dilemma through a speech about how love is sweeter than spicy food. It’s a thoroughly unearned conclusion to a movie that spent its first hour showing us people who are broke, bitter, and desperate enough to commit fraud. If I'm honest, the last act completely unravels, turning a messy, interesting character study into a standard-issue lecture on why lying to the police is bad for your karma.

Yet it remains oddly watchable despite those structural cracks, mostly because the actors seem to be having fun eating their way through Uttar Pradesh while the crew figures out the lighting on the fly. It doesn't reach the quiet, observational heights of Band Baaja Baaraat, but it has a messy, greasy charm that survives its own terrible plotting.