There is a specific kind of shoulder shrug Abhay Deol does about twenty minutes into Socha Na Tha that I still think about whenever someone tries to pitch me on the evolution of the Bollywood romantic comedy. He is standing in some brightly lit Delhi living room surrounded by uncles who are aggressively uninterested in his actual opinions, wearing a shirt that cost maybe three hundred rupees at a local market, and he just dips one shoulder down and tilts his head away from the camera like a guy trying to ignore a mild toothache. It is not a heroic posture. It lacks the square-jawed defiance you got in every other Dharma production from that exact window, and if I am honest, it looked entirely improvised by an actor who had no idea what he was supposed to do with his hands while the dialogue coach droned on about family honor. Imtiaz Ali directs his first feature film with the chaotic energy of someone who read a lot of campus plays and watched too many middle-tier Richard Linklater movies on a pirated VCD, which means the blocking has this ragged, stuttering pace where people are always walking away from conversations before they actually finish making their points. The screenplay does something deeply weird for a Hindi film of that specific vintage by letting its protagonists just be sort of irritating for long stretches instead of instantly endearing, stuffing them into messy living situations and awkward dinner parties where the lighting is flat and unforgiving.

Ayesha Takia spends the first half of the movie looking like she has been hauled out of bed at four in the morning to pose for a cousin’s wedding album, which works weirdly well for a character being railroaded into an arranged marriage by relatives who talk about her future like they are discussing the acquisition of a used hatchback. She does not do that big, shiny Bollywood heroine smile where every tooth catches the key light; she gives you these tight, suspicious little grimaces that suggest she would rather chew broken glass than listen to another lecture from her aunt about what the neighbors will say. When she and Deol are thrown together in hotel lobbies and highway dhabas, they do not have that instant, electric click you get in Hum Tum or whatever other glossy studio project was playing in multiplexes that year, but rather the weary, defensive rapport of two strangers stuck in a broken-down elevator who are already sick of each other's breathing. They argue about stupid things with genuine rancor, their voices cracking in the middle of lines because the sound recordist clearly missed the memo about keeping the boom mic steady in drafty hill station corridors. Deol’s character Viren is a remarkably unwashed protagonist for a romantic lead, wearing the same crumpled denim jacket through sequences that must cover at least four days of travel, and he has this habit of trailing off mid-sentence when he realizes he sounds like an idiot. It is a minor detail, but the dubbing on the background actors in the Goa resort scenes is so wildly out of sync that you can literally watch a waiter's mouth close three seconds before the audio line about mineral water finishes echoing through the mono speakers.

The music, composed by Sandesh Shandilya, avoids the bombastic percussion loops that were choking the charts at the time, opting instead for acoustic guitars that sound slightly out of tune in the best possible way, as if recorded in a bedroom with a carpet on the wall to dampen the echo. That title track appears about twelve times too many, bleeding into scenes where people are just walking down quiet suburban lanes or staring blankly at ceiling fans, turning into an auditory wallpaper that occasionally threatens to drown out the awkward pauses between the leads. Cinematographer Sachin Krishn shoots Delhi and its surrounding satellite towns without any of the golden-hour gloss that Yash Chopra made mandatory, capturing instead that dusty, greyish-white glare that actually hits the windshield when you are driving down the Ring Road in November. There are moments where the camera bobs around like the operator was running to catch a bus, cutting away from reaction shots just as a face is starting to register an emotion, leaving you hanging in a way that feels less like artistic restraint and more like a rushed editing bay schedule. Yet this lack of polish gives the film its texture. It feels like a home video made by someone with a modest credit card limit and a bunch of friends who were willing to work for cold coffee and leftover samosas.

Hindi cinema has always had this bizarre obsession with parental approval, turning every minor domestic disagreement into a moral crisis involving God and the tricolor, but Socha Na Tha keeps shrinking the frame until the conflict is just two exhausted young adults hiding behind a parked Maruti because they do not want to face their cousins inside. The class dynamics are sketched with a bluntness that borders on accidental, showing us affluent Punjabi households where the refrigerators are always full of plastic containers of leftover paneer and the air conditioning hums so loudly that characters have to shout their insecurities over the compressor. Viren’s family is wealthy enough to afford multiple domestic servants who are treated like animated pieces of furniture, a detail the script never pauses to interrogate or apologize for, simply letting it sit there as part of the suffocating domestic wallpaper. In that sense, it shares a DNA with something like Dil Chahta Hai, though without the crisp graphic-design sheen or the wealthy-kid detachment, feeling instead like the poor cousin who went to a state university and has to borrow his uncle’s scooter on weekends. The romance doesn't arrive via a slow-motion breeze blowing through a chiffon dupatta; it crawls out of endless phone conversations on landlines that cost three rupees a minute, interrupted by mothers shouting from the kitchen about turning off the immersion rod.

What keeps the film from floating away into total insignificance is the stubborn refusal of its main characters to learn any profound lessons about life by the time the credits start rolling. They do not undergo an inner transformation or discover the true meaning of love through a musical montage in Switzerland, and when they finally make a choice about their future, it feels less like a triumph of the human spirit and more like two people settling on a restaurant because they are both too tired to keep walking. That ending has this weird, truncated quality, cutting to black right as a minor character is about to deliver a punchline, as if the director ran out of film stock or simply got bored with his own plot resolution. It is a small movie that smells faintly of stale cigarette smoke and cheap leather wallets left out in the sun, lacking the grand architecture of the classics we are supposed to revere, yet it holds together because nobody on screen is ever trying to sell you a lifestyle. They just look tired, sweaty, and slightly annoyed to be here, which is about as close to real life as commercial Hindi cinema ever managed to get during that decade without completely forgetting to be entertaining.