There is a specific kind of vanity unique to actors returning to the screen after a prolonged absence where every frame seems curated by a committee terrified of aging, and Ishkq In Paris suffers from this exact affliction right out of the gate with an opening sequence that lingers on Preity Zinta’s face like a polaroid left too long in the sun. I’m not saying she looks bad, because she doesn't, but the lighting team clearly had a standing order to treat every close-up as if it were a high-end perfume commercial filmed during the golden hour in Montmartre. You notice the filters before you notice the plot, which is usually a bad sign for a romantic comedy that wants you to believe in the spontaneous magic of two strangers meeting over wine and bad poetry in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It is a bit too glossy from frame one, coated in a digital sheen that flattens out the actual grit of the city streets until Paris looks less like a place where people live and more like a permanent green-screen backdrop bought on clearance from a French tourism board.

Prem Raj steps into the director's chair with a resume that suggests he knows how to service a star vehicle, having spent years around big-budget sets, but his actual command of pacing here is erratic at best and baffling at worst. The screenplay, which Zinta co-wrote herself, leans heavily on the tired trope of the commitment-phobic woman who has been hurt by a past relationship and now hides behind a wall of cynical quips and designer scarves while drinking copious amounts of espresso in outdoor cafes. She plays Ishkq, spelled with an unnecessary extra q because someone involved in the production clearly thought standard spelling was too pedestrian for a contemporary romance set in Europe, and her counterpart is Akash, played by Rhehan Malliek with the kind of pleasant, unmemorable charm that makes you wonder how he keeps managing to land scenes opposite major stars without ever developing an identifiable screen presence of his own. Their initial meet-cute involves a spilled drink and some half-hearted banter that feels less like witty repartee and more like a series of first-draft dialogue prompts that somehow survived into the final cut without a single pass from a script doctor.

Rhehan Malliek has the difficult task of playing the straight man to Zinta’s whirlwind of manicured energy, and he handles it mostly by standing near various Parisian landmarks looking agreeable while she delivers lines about modern love that sound like they were scraped from the margin of a college sophomore's notebook. He is fine, not great, not bad, just there, functioning mostly as a human hat rack who occasionally gets to smile and say something reassuring before the narrative shoves them into yet another musical number. Zinta, on the other hand, is working overtime to recapture the effervescent charm that made her a household name back when Dil Chahta Hai was redefining how young people in Hindi movies spoke and dressed. She still has that trademark dimpled smile, but here it is deployed with such mechanical frequency that it starts to feel less like an expression of joy and more like a defensive reflex against the passage of time. When she shares the screen with Isabelle Adjani, who drops in for a brief and slightly bewildered turn as her mother, the generational contrast is stark enough to give you whiplash, exposing the lightweight nature of the script even further by placing a genuine screen icon next to a Bollywood star doing her best impression of a lifestyle blogger.

The cinematography relies almost exclusively on postcard clichés, panning endlessly across the Seine and framing our leads against twinkling night views of the Eiffel Tower until you feel like you are trapped inside a screensaver that refuses to turn off. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how every time the characters walk into a cafe, the background extras are visibly struggling to pretend they aren't staring directly into the camera lens, a technical oversight that breaks the illusion of a bustling European metropolis in almost every wide shot. The soundtrack, composed by Sajid-Wajid, recycles the same generic techno-pop beats and acoustic guitar riffs whenever the mood threatens to dip below moderately pleasant, dragging out emotional beats long after the point has already been made by the actors’ faces. There’s a repeating motif with a violin that sounds like it was lifted from a royalty-free stock library, popping up at least three times in the second half during scenes where Ishkq looks pensively out of a window while wearing a trench coat that costs more than my first car.

Midway through, Salman Khan shows up for a promotional item song that has virtually nothing to do with the plot, wearing a tight leather jacket and grinding against a CGI backdrop with the glazed-over expression of a man who was promised he only had to work for twenty minutes and is currently holding the crew to that exact timeline. It interrupts the narrative flow so violently that you half-expect the projectionist to accidentally switch reels to a completely different film, though honestly, that might have provided a welcome diversion from the dreary inevitability of the central romance. Shekhar Kapur also pops up in a cameo as a wise older mentor figure who dispenses relationship advice over a game of chess, delivering his lines with a bemused detachment that suggests he read his pages in the dressing room five minutes before the cameras rolled. These celebrity drop-ins are meant to inject star power into a flagging production, but they only serve to emphasize how hollow the core relationship is, turning a modest romantic comedy into a parade of favor-calling and industry cameos.

The film attempts to tackle the modern anxiety surrounding marriage and emotional intimacy, positioning its heroine as a casualty of divorce culture who uses her nomadic lifestyle as a shield against genuine connection. It is a relatable enough premise on paper, but the execution reduces generational trauma to a series of glossy montage sequences where Zinta stares mournfully at old photographs while wearing very expensive loungewear in a sunlit apartment. There is no real weight to her hesitation because the script refuses to let her be genuinely unlikable or difficult, settling instead for a sanitized version of heartbreak that never gets its fingernails dirty in the actual mess of human interaction. When the obligatory third-act misunderstanding finally arrives, triggered by a minor miscommunication that could have been cleared up with a five-second text message, you can practically hear the collective sigh of the audience wishing the runtime away.

We have seen this exact narrative arc play out dozens of times before in romantic comedies dating back to the late nineties, and Ishkq In Paris adds nothing new to the formula, lacking even the self-aware irony that kept Jab We Met afloat when its own plotting started to wobble. It feels dated in the way that early digital-era romantic dramas often do, caught in an awkward transitional phase between old-school cinematic melodrama and modern streaming-era minimalism. Zinta produces and stars, carrying the weight of the entire enterprise on shoulders that look increasingly tired under the relentless pressure of maintaining a youthful persona, and you can sense her desperation for the material to work even as the scenes stubbornly refuse to catch fire. By the time the inevitable happy ending rolls around at an airport terminal, complete with a dramatic run through security and cheering onlookers, the emotional exhaustion is total. It's a misfire that squanders its scenic locations on a flat story, proving that all the Parisian atmosphere in the world cannot save a movie that forgot to give its characters anything real to say to each other.