That specific acoustic guitar chord progression has been beaten half to death across three decades of Hindi movies, yet Anu Menon keeps using it every single time Ali Zafar’s character tries to look sensitive in a public park. Nikhil and Lalisa live in three different cities over eight years, which is about seven years too long for two people who communicate entirely through passive-aggressive banter and lingering close-ups that outstay their welcome by at least four frames. If I'm honest, the editing rhythm in the London segment feels like it was put together by someone who just discovered the dissolve transition in Premiere and refused to turn it off. We watch them meet at Heathrow, trade insults about their respective accents, and wander into a pub where nobody is actually drinking real beer. It’s a very particular kind of modern romantic drama that relies heavily on the assumption that if you stick attractive people in front of iconic European monuments, the audience won't notice the dialogue sounds like it was scraped off the comments section of an early Tumblr blog.

Ali Zafar plays Nikhil with that specific brand of arrogant charm that usually works much better in music videos than it does across a ninety-minute feature about emotional maturation. He has this habit of half-smiling while someone else is talking, as if he knows the punchline to a joke the director hasn't told the rest of the cast yet. Aditi Rao Hydari, as Lalisa, does a lot of heavy lifting with her eyes, darting them away from the camera whenever the script demands she display vulnerability instead of just looking annoyed in various expensive coats. The chemistry between them isn't electric, exactly, but it has a prickly, annoying friction that feels somewhat genuine. They argue about pretentious things with the earnestness of college sophomores who just read their first translated paperback. When they fight in a Paris apartment over a burnt omelet, the scene actually works because they stop trying to be witty and just sound tired of each other. It’s a small thing, but the way Zafar constantly drops his jaw in mock disbelief during arguments got old around the forty-minute mark and never really recovered.

Menon’s direction tries desperately to evoke Before Sunrise minus any of the conversational dexterity or structural patience that made Richard Linklater’s film actually watchable. The camera never stays still for more than six seconds, panning across Parisian cafes and New York brownstones with a nervous energy that suggests the DP was afraid the audience would fall asleep if a lens wasn't tracking past a neon sign. There’s an entire sequence in the New York chapter where they walk through a snowy park while talking about their respective career failures, and the fake breath added in post-production looks like someone sprayed white paint onto the negative. It reminds me of Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal, except without the emotional anchor of generational contrast to save it from the sheer exhaustion of watching two people break up and make up for reasons that remain entirely opaque. The screenplay by Anu Menon and Ishita Moitra insists on dividing the narrative into three distinct blocks, which only serves to highlight how little the characters actually change between their early twenties and their late twenties aside from upgrading their luggage.

The soundtrack tries to do all the emotional work that the screenplay forgot to write into the scenes themselves. Every time Lalisa looks out a rainy window in New York, a soaring vocal track kicks in to remind us that she is feeling sad about her choices. It is loud, it is constant, and it refuses to let a single conversation breathe without a string arrangement hovering in the background like an anxious chaperone. Yet the title track itself has a genuinely catchy, driving rhythm that almost makes you forgive the fact that the lyrics sound like they were generated by an algorithm designed to appeal to diaspora teenagers. The cinematography by Sameer Arya leans heavily into postcard blues and golden hour ambers, making every single city look like it was lit by a team of interior designers who only work with mood boards. It’s glossy in that specific way that contemporary urban Hindi films often pursue at the expense of texture, smoothing out the dirt and the mess until everything resembles an airport lounge advertisement.

Class resentment and artistic ambition are tossed around between the leads like beanbags, introduced for a scene to create fake stakes before being abandoned for another round of walking and talking against a pretty skyline. Nikhil wants to be a filmmaker who matters, whatever that means in the context of writing commercials for toothpaste, and Lalisa wants to design clothes while carrying around a vague sense of generational trauma that never gets explained beyond her strict parents. They yell at each other about selling out while standing in front of genuinely massive apartments that neither of them could possibly afford on their stated incomes. It’s an upper-middle-class fantasy version of struggling in the West, where the worst consequence of financial distress is having to drink instant coffee instead of an espresso at a corner bistro. The film wants to say something profound about how timing ruins otherwise decent relationships, but it keeps getting distracted by how good Aditi Rao Hydari looks in a turtleneck under the New York snow.

There is a supporting actor in the Paris sequence, a French landlord who speaks English with a dubbing-track delay that is so distracting it pulls you right out of the narrative every single time he opens his mouth to demand rent. It’s a completely minor technical oversight, but it points to a wider sloppiness in the post-production phase that plagues the entire middle section. The jump cuts between dialogue lines often clip the ends of words, creating a choppy rhythm that makes the actors look like they are rushing to beat a stopwatch. Zafar and Hydari do manage to pull off a couple of genuinely quiet moments toward the end, sitting on a New York curb without the safety net of a musical cue or a dramatic camera movement. Those four minutes are better than the preceding hour of forced banter and tourist-board tracking shots. It’s a pity the script immediately rushes them back into another shouting match about commitment right before the fade to black, refusing to let them just sit quietly with their failure. The credits roll over a behind-the-scenes montage that features the cast laughing in London, which feels less like a celebration of the work and more like a reminder that everyone involved had a much better time making this than anyone will ever have watching it.