As Jab We Met (2007) opens, Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) is having a bad day, week, month and year. His father has died, the family corporation is struggling, he's locked in a very messy courtroom battle with his estranged mother (Divya Seth Shah), and his longtime girlfriend has married someone else. Desolate, Aditya walks out of a meeting and just keeps walking, eventually finding himself on a train to Delhi. Aditya contemplates throwing himself off, but he's interrupted by Geet (Kareena Kapoor), a fellow passenger who will not stop talking.
Geet is persistent, even though Adityaa clearly wants to be left alone. When he gets off the train during a late night stop, she follows. And then she misses the train! Geet is furious, and demands that Aditya escort her home to her family in Punjab. Aditya agrees, because he's got nothing better to do and because he's kind of bemused by Geet, the dreamiest of manic pixie girls.
So, the pair make their way across India. There are adventures. More importantly, there are conversations. Aditya tells Geet about his broken relationship, his broken family, and his broken dream of becoming a musician. Geet tells Aditya about her very traditional Sikh family and her secret boyfriend Anshuman (Tarun Arora), who is not a Sikh and with whom she is planning to elope.By the end of the trip, Aditya obviously has a thing for Geet, but she's sticking with Anshuman, and in the spirit of compromise suggests that Aditya elope with her sister Roop (Saumya Tandon) instead, and then they can all go live in the mountains together.
When they arrive in Punjab, Geet''s family are initially suspicious of Aditya, but after she explains how he helped her they insist on him staying for a week so that they can thank him properly. He has a wonderful time, but when Geet decides it's elopin' time, he still feels compelled to help her. There's another roadtrip as the pair make their way to Manali, in the far northern part of India, but this time it's handled with a single song. Once they reach Manali, Aditya says his goodbyes and walks away before Geet goes to meet Anshuman.
Aditya goes home and transforms his life. He transforms the business into a major success, reconciles with his mother, and even takes up singing again, and everything he does, he does because of Geet. "Your absence is like your presence," he sings; while he misses her, she's always in his heart, and that gives him the strength to carry on and live his best life. And then, nine months later, Geet's family tracks him down and demands to know what he's done with their child, because the movie's only halfway over.
Many Bollywood movies will mix up the genres, combining romance with action and comic relief and magic realism. This is the straight stuff, pure uncut Bollywood romance. And it works, largely because of the characters. Aditya is not only rich and handsome and talented, he's an astonishingly decent person, able to take no for an answer and still do everything possible to help the woman he loves without hoping for a reward. He's very honest about his love for Geet, but he's quick to add, "But that's my problem." (Of course Aditya gets the girl in the end, but when he does he is genuinely surprised.) And Geet is free spirited and quirky in the first part of the movie but shifts believably to dour and cynical in the second. It would be easy to make her into a caricature, but Kareena Kapoor presents her as a well rounded person with agency and dreams of her own, rather than as a motivation for Aditya's character development. Jab We Met came out only four years after Kareena's widely panned (including by me) performance in Khushi. The growth in her confidence and skill is remarkable.
While I love a good masala flick at least as much as the next guy (probably more) it's okay to just do one thing if you do it well. Jab We Met does one thing really well.
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