Imagine suddenly discovering that Farida Jalal is your grandmother.

Saif Ali Khan is one of Bollywood's most talented and versatile actors . . . now.  But before his complex and nuanced performances in movies like Omkara and Being Cyrus, Khan rose to prominence with a string of perfectly adequate performances in movies like Yeh Dillagi and Dil Tera Diwana.  Like a lot of Bollywood actors of the era, Khan had a consistent persona; his characters tended to be charming ladies' men who are more than a little self-absorbed, at least until they are transformed by the love of a good woman.  All of which brings me to Jawaani Jaaneman (2020), in which Khan plays a charming ladies' man who is more than a little self-absorbed, but this time, he's middle aged!

Khan plays Jaswinder "Jazz" Singh, a London real estate broker who is living his dream life: a few hours a day working with his long suffering brother Dimpy (Kumud Mishra) as they chase the deal of a lifetime, long nights in the night club owned by his friend Rocky (Chunky Pandey), and the occasional Sunday dinner with his parents.  When his mother (Faida Jalal) asks him when he's going to settle down and start a family of his own, Jazz always insists that he's happy being free, and he seems to really mean it.

And then she walks into the night club, and into his life.  She is Tia (the splendidly named Alaya Furniturewala), a bright, beautiful young woman from Amsterdam who is looking for the man who might be her father.  After a bit of cajoling, Jazz agrees to a DNA test, and the pair discover that a) Jazz is indeed Tia's father, and b) Tia is pregnant, meaning that Jazz has gone from zero to grandpa in the space of a day.  Before long, Tia has moved in to Jazz's bachelor pad, and a reluctant Jazz has started to discover that adulting isn't so bad after all.

And that's basically the movie.  Oh, there are subplots, as Jazz pursues the aforementioned deal of a lifetime and nearly stumbles into a grown-up relationship with his hairdresser and sassy platonic gal pal Rhea (Kubbra Sait), and there are complications, most notably the arrival of Tia's hapless ex-boyfriend Rohan (Dante Alexander) and her aggressively laid-back hippie mother Ananya (Tabu), but at heart it's a very simple story about a charming but self-absorbed ladies' man who is transformed by the love of his long lost daughter.  Saif Ali is playing basically the same character he used to play twenty five years ago, but now he's doing it with an extra quarter century's worth of acting skills, and it makes a difference.  The entire cast is great, particularly Tabu, who combines New Age enlightenment with self-centered condescension, putting the aggressive in passive aggressiveness.  Still, while Ananya is usually terrible in an entertaining fashion, she's also involved in the film's one sour note, propositioning a clearly reluctant Jazz in a scene which promptly cuts to black.  It's played for laughs, but if the genders had been flipped I don't think anyone would have found it funny.

Apart from that bit of unpleasantness, Jawaani Jaaneman is a charming and sweet love story about a different kind of love.  I recommend almost all of the movie.