Just announced/leaked/confirmed/however you want to put it: Kajol is doing a cameo in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil!  And also, Fawad and Siddharth.  But mostly, Kajol!

Which brings up the question, what the heck is Ae Dil Hai Mushkil?

Way way back, when it was first announced that Karan would be doing a movie with Ranbir, Aish, and Anoushka, everyone went “huh?”  Because, what are you going to do with those 3 leads!  Aish is too young to Ranbir’s mother, but too old to be part of a traditional love triangle with him.  Maybe she could be his sister?  Or stepmother?  Or Anoushka’s mother?

That last is actually reasonable, by the way.  There’s 15 years between them, so you can massage it a little, say Aish married young and Anoushka plays a few years younger than she is in real life.  It’s what I would do, if I had that cast.  I would do a deep look at a young widowed mother just discovering her life at the same time that her daughter is falling in love, or something like that.  Like Pyaar Mein Twist!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THqizulXtsM

(Although I wouldn’t necessarily have Baby Spice do a cameo in my version.  Also, Dimple here is only 6 years older than Aish is today)

But, after letting us all speculate for as long as possible, there was a further leak that it might be a remake of an old Rishi-Neetu-Rakhi movie, Doosra Aadmi.  They are promoting it as a possible remake for the casting, of course.  Getting Rishi and Neetu’s son to play his father in a remake of one of the last movies they starred in together before getting married.  The original had a similar casting by family connection angle, getting Rishi’s uncle Shashi to do a cameo.

I watched Doosra Aadmi in preparation, and having seen it, I actually think Karan was brilliant with his casting.  The original is all about taking these three different people, and showing how they all have their own concerns and problems which lead them into relationships with each other.  It’s very similar to Kabhi Alveda Na Kehna, or even Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, where you feel for them all equally and know there is no good outcome for the situation.  It’s one of those movies where, on paper, nothing really happens.  But inside the characters, everything does.

Neetu’s character is the most straight-forward, so a great role for Anoushka who always has a sort of straight-shooter feel onscreen.  Neetu is in love with her boyfriend.  They are young, but they convince their parents to let them get married.  She moves into her in-law’s house and supports her husband when he starts his own business so he can feel like he is standing on his own.  But over time, he is working more and more and even her in-laws start to feel sorry for her, and suspect he is having an affair.  She tries to hide her worries and her problems, but is so young that she can’t really keep them inside.  It ends up making her go a little crazy.  Not sure how they will handle that part in this, in the original it is so clearly a combination of being married so young, having no life outside of her marriage/husband, and divorce not being an option.  But I suppose you could still establish the Anoushka-Ranbir relationship as being so close and strong that it really would make her feel unmoored if she thought he stopped loving her.

Rishi’s character is sort of young and old at the same time, a playboy but also an innocent.  So, again, perfect for Ranbir!  In the original, Rishi was torn between his sweet young wife, who didn’t seem to fully understand or be able to relate to the new grown-up world of business and struggle he was in, and this beautiful and talented and successful woman who could work with him as a partner in his business and show him a world beyond the regular college life he had with Neetu, or his comfortable home with his parents.

Rakhi’s character is a really tough one.  But I think it would work for Aish, if Karan manages to lean into her natural inclinations.  Keep the “acting!” toned down, make it more like how she is on talk shows or interviews.  The idea is, this is a woman who is so naturally graceful and polished, that no one ever knows what she is really thinking or feeling.  That’s what causes all the problems, that no one realizes what a mess she is.  Rishi gets obsessed with her, with how mysterious and amazing she is.  But we the audience know through flashbacks and exposition from other characters that she is actually hiding a whole horrible history.  Her fiance died years earlier, following which she retreated into depression which she masked with her perfect demeanor.  While Rishi’s character sees her as remote and tantalizing, in fact she is the one chasing him.  Not in some sort of cougar-y way, but because he reminds her of the man she used to love (this is where the casting triumph of getting Shashi to play her old love comes in, because uncle and nephew really did have a similar way of acting and the audience could sympathize with her confusion).  And she doesn’t even necessarily realize she is trying to turn one man into the other.

Yeah, so now there’s Kajol!  Fawad was already announced, probably playing the Shashi role in flashbacks.  But who could Kajol play?  It will probably just be some in the middle of a dance number, like in Student of the Year or Kabhi Alveda Na Kehna, but wouldn’t it be great if she was an actual character?  Like, the supportive friend who advises Anoushka?  Or a gossiping party guest who spreads the affair rumor?  Or Ranbir’s secretary who makes faces behind Aish’s back whenever she comes to the office?  Or a super powerful business woman whose account they are trying to win?  I almost wish she could play the main older woman character, but if it is at all like the original, that would be a disaster!  The whole idea is that the older woman is opaque, allowing the young people to put their own insecurities and fantasies on her.  Kajol’s face is anything but opaque!  In an interview or in character, you always know exactly what she is thinking.