Rajiv’s knit sweaters in the first half of Ishq Vishk look like they cost more than my entire first car, and if I'm honest, that wardrobe department choice alone tells you almost everything you need to know about the aesthetic priorities of Bollywood at the turn of the millennium. It is a movie that smells faintly of Yardley talcum powder and fresh college stationery, smelling precisely of the kind of privileged middle-class youth that actually existed only in the imaginations of ad filmmakers who had never set foot inside a standard government-funded campus. Director Ken Ghosh treats Dehradun like an upscale European ski resort where nobody ever sweats or has to worry about supplementary exams. The screenplay by Shiraz Ahmed bounces around with a strange kind of narrative hyperactivity, setting up emotional stakes that get resolved three scenes later by a stray cricket ball or a musical montage filmed in a damp meadow. You can feel the ghost of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge hovering over the entire enterprise, though without that film's weirdly hypnotic rhythm or its genuine sense of geographic space. Instead, Ghosh cuts everything to ribbons in the editing room, utilizing dissolves that feel like someone pulling a dusty velvet curtain across your field of vision just as a scene might be getting interesting.

Shahid Kapoor makes his debut here with the kind of intense, almost frantic energy that usually belongs to stage actors trying to reach the back row of a barn. He plays Rajiv with a thoroughly obnoxious entitlement that makes his eventual redemption arc feel less earned than relieved. He’s got these huge, expressive eyes that work overtime whenever he has to look remorseful after dumping Amrita Rao’s Payal for a girl who looks like she walked off a billboard for frosted lip gloss. It is a messy, unpolished performance that lacks the smooth sheen of contemporary star grooming, which turns out to be its greatest asset. Kapoor trips over his own delivery during the dramatic confrontation scenes in the second half, his voice cracking with a vulnerability that cannot be coached. Beside him, Amrita Rao does something quite remarkable with a character written mostly as an appendage to male ego. She plays the spurned childhood friend with a quiet, devastating stillness that anchors the movie whenever it threatens to float away into cotton candy fluff and slow-motion hair flips. When she looks at Rajiv across a crowded college canteen, you can see twenty years of shared history evaporating in real time, and it’s a heavy, uncomfortable look that doesn't belong in a glossy youth romance. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the sound design constantly drops in these wet, echoing footsteps for her character even when she’s walking on thick carpet, as if the Foley artist forgot they weren't on a gravel path.

The cinematography by Kabir Lal relies heavily on soft-focus lenses and golden hour sunlight that seems to follow the actors indoors, bathing every hostel corridor in a rich, amber glow that looks entirely fake. Every frame is saturated to the point where the greens of the college lawns look like they’ve been radioactive-treated, giving the whole affair the texture of a high-end catalogue for knitwear. Anu Malik’s soundtrack hits you over the head with the exact same melodic hook in at least four different tracks, recycling a flute motif until you want to throw your empty popcorn tub at the screen. Yet, despite the repetitive arrangements, the title track still possesses a clumsy, irresistible bounce that makes the choreography by Longinus Fernandes work even when the dancers are clearly hitting their marks with visible hesitation. The songs function as narrative speed bumps, slowing down a plot that is already desperately trying to pad itself out to the standard two-and-a-half-hour runtime required of Hindi films of that era. There is an entire wedding sequence in the middle that achieves nothing except allowing the supporting cast to wear very expensive silk costumes and dance awkwardly in unison while the leads stare at each other with heavy, longing expressions.

Beneath the frothy exterior, the narrative is actually tracking a rather narrow and slightly toxic notion of romantic ownership. Rajiv assumes that Payal is a permanent fixture of his social landscape, a default setting he can return to whenever his attempts at high-status dating blow up in his face. The film doesn't quite know how to handle the fact that its hero is essentially a jerk for the first ninety minutes, treating his casual cruelty as mere youthful indiscretion rather than a personality flaw worth addressing properly. This was a common blind spot in Hindi movies of that decade, where bad behavior from a leading man was usually excused as a symptom of youthful high spirits rather than actual malice. When Payal finally stands up to him in the rain, the sequence works not because the dialogue is particularly sharp, but because Rao infuses her lines with a tired exhaustion that feels genuinely earned by the preceding hours of emotional whiplash. You are left watching a romantic comedy that is constantly fighting its own instincts, trying to be a modern story about consent and independence while also clinging to the old-fashioned comfort of the mandatory happy ending where everyone pairs off neatly according to parental expectations.

The supporting players wander in and out of the frame with varying degrees of commitment, chewing the scenery whenever the script gives them permission to yell about final exams or college fests. Shenaz Treasurywala plays the glamorous outsider who captures Rajiv's attention, and she delivers every single line of dialogue with the bright, hollow cheer of a flight attendant on an overbooked morning flight. She doesn't have much to do besides look unimpressed by small-town life and wear low-rise jeans that generated a surprising amount of moral panic among conservative distributors at the time. The film feels strangely dated now, less because of the decade-specific clothing and more because of the earnest way it treats the hierarchy of college popularity as a matter of life and death. It shares DNA with something like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, though stripped of Karan Johar’s maximalist visual flair and replaced with a much more modest, lower-budget television aesthetic. You can watch the seams of the production showing in the background extras who clearly have no idea what they are supposed to be doing with their hands during group scenes in the library. It is a messy, charmingly flawed artifact of a transitional period for Bollywood movies, caught between the old formulaic studio machine and the slicker, corporate-funded teen romances that would follow later in the decade.