Quiteliterally Love - Aaj - Kal, Imtiaz Ali's take on loves-lovers past and present is a good follow-up to Jab We Met. Any notions of the film being merely an exercise in comparison are dispelled before halftime. Jai (Saif Ali Khan) and Meera (Deepika Padukone) have to go through their respective dreams of working for Golden Gate Inc. and doing restoration work to monuments in Dilli before realizing their need for one another. The theme of bridges isn't bandied about on screen (the title has the Golden Gate adorning it) but presented with subtlety; their metaphorical nature - Jai is well into 'building bridges' with Veer Singh (Rishi Kapoor, so effortless that the role hints at a palpable danger of his being typecast in the future) - is driven home with clarity. In short, the crucial ingredients that made people susceptible in the decades past to falling headlong into love - deprivation and finding access to one's partner difficult - are the missing pieces for the modern couple too. Almost as if a work of art was finding itself, the film heaves an audible sigh, relieved that not much has changed over the years.

About the pair then. Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone have zero natural chemistry and far from being a detractor, it adds to the experience - it makes their on-screen vibes seem very appealing. Indian filmmakers dealing with love stories go to great lengths in casting the lead pair and try to derive much of the chemistry from the pair itself. None of that here. Imtiaz has worked at extracting performances from the duo making them seem every inch a couple by dint of putting them at ease with each other and also by the play of events.

Love Aaj Kal holds testimony to the comfort levels Indian filmmakers have established with cinematographic techniques (Natarajan Subramaniam, here) in the past decade. Experimenting yet but there are genuine indicators here to the control they have over the same. The period pieces don't feel overdone. The songs (Pritam) could have added more to the film and only two of them (Chor Bazaari and Dooriyan) register.

All these are packaged into just-about-two-hours making for a crisp movie. For that alone, Imtiaz deserves applause.