The film follows Shrirenu Tripathi (R Madhavan), a 42-year-old Sanskrit professor in Jamshedpur, who finds himself inexplicably paired with Madhu Bose (Fatima Sana Shaikh), a French-teaching, hyper-liberal Bengali woman from Kolkata. What should be a sensitive cross-cultural romance instead becomes a crash course in stereotype theatre.
Bengali = Progressive? Bollywood, Please Evolve
Bollywood has long held a curious fascination with Bengali characters. They are often painted as enlightened beings, artsy, liberal, emotional, and somehow superior to the rest. ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ leans into this fantasy hard. Madhu’s family exists not as people but as mood boards, art on the walls, poetry in their veins, and Tagore quotes in every other conversation.
But far from celebrating cultural richness, the film turns Bengali identity into a visual and moral gimmick, a way to signal modernity without doing the work to earn it. Even the end credits, stylised with Jamini Roy-inspired figures, feel like a hollow gesture rather than homage.
Once Again, Women Must Fix the Men
The emotional labour in this story, like many Dharma tales, falls squarely on the woman. Madhu is tasked with understanding, reforming, and essentially rescuing Shrirenu from his outdated beliefs. It’s a narrative device so overused it’s almost invisible now, except here it feels particularly regressive.
Shrirenu’s transformation from emotionally stunted virgin to worthy partner is never truly earned. It’s forced, mechanical, and built on clumsy writing rather than real emotional growth. Madhu’s continued investment in him doesn’t read as romantic; it reads as exhausting.
Writing That Talks Down to the Audience
The screenplay treats character depth as optional. A man is old-school? Make him a Sanskrit professor. A woman is modern? Make her Bengali and let her say ‘breathtaking’ in French. There’s no curiosity, no complexity, just a series of choices that exist to tick diversity boxes.
Dialogue swings between the pretentious (“You touched me without touching me”) and downright cringe (“Oh Mommy, Oh Daddy” during pillow talk). It’s as if the script was written by a group of people who had heard about good romantic comedies but never actually watched one.
Algorithm Cinema: Pretty, Predictable, Pointless
Like many recent streaming films, ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ feels crafted more for thumbnails and timelines than for theatres or hearts. The visuals are polished, sure, Jamshedpur glows, and Kolkata shimmers, but they feel curated, not lived-in. It’s a story told at a distance, emotionally and culturally.
There are glimpses of visual flair, Soni has an eye, but without emotional substance, his frames are just decoration. The sets are beautiful, but the emotions are not.
Miscast, Misused, Misguided
Madhavan, usually a charming presence, is stiff and unlikable in this role. His Shrirenu is not awkwardly sweet but irritatingly regressive. Fatima Sana Shaikh, fresh off a powerful performance in ‘Metro… In Dino’, looks stranded in a role that wants her to be both a feminist icon and a fantasy figure, and ends up being neither.
Supporting actors, including the ever-reliable Manish Chaudhari, are wasted in cartoonish roles meant to signal plot turns rather than deepen them.
Stereotypes Are Not Storytelling
At its worst, ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ reinforces the same cultural clichés Bollywood has been peddling for decades: Punjabis are loud, Bengalis are woke, small towns are backwards, and women exist to teach men how to feel. It’s a flattened version of India designed for surface-level relatability, not reflection.
Worse still, it dilutes cinema’s potential to connect across differences. Cultural shorthand may work in memes, but it robs films of humanity and texture. The result? A movie that says nothing new, and says the old things badly.
At its core, ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ is a parody of a Bollywood rom-com disguised as the real thing. It borrows beats from ‘Vicky Donor’, ‘2 States’, and ‘Rocky Aur Rani’, but strips them of their charm, replacing wit with weak punchlines and nuance with noise.
By presenting Bengalis as the default cultural fixers, intellectual, liberated, and emotionally evolved, the film not only flattens an entire community into a stereotype but also burdens them with the job of saving regressive men. Again.
When Will It End?
That question lingers. When will Bollywood stop using culture as an aesthetic instead of identity? When will women be allowed to grow without healing broken men? When will cross-cultural love stories explore real complexity instead of retreating into cliché?
‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ isn’t just a bad film, it’s a lazy one. And laziness in representation is dangerous. It doesn’t challenge bias; it comforts it.
Until filmmakers choose depth over decor, stereotype over symbolism, and truth over template, we’ll keep getting films like this, films that look like progress but act like reruns.
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