Love and elephants.

Dil Tera Hogaya (2020)  is a little different from my usual fare; it's not just a movie from Pakistan, it's a TV movie from Pakistan.  It manages to feel very familiar, but with a few notable differences.

Ahmad (Jawed Sheikh) and his brother Arshad (Farhan Ally Agha) live together in their family estate in Pakistan.  The brothers get along well, but their wives, Fehmi (Saba Faisal) and Zoobi (Shaheen Khan), respectively, do not.  The women were childhood friends, but they've had a serious falling out, and they've partitioned the house, with Chanda the maid (Mizna Waqas) moving back and forth between the feuding in-laws, taking advantage where she can.

Fehmi works as a dressmaker and designer, though it seems that a good part of her business is making copies of other designers.  She's assisted by her son Annu (Feroze Khan), and she's raised him to be just as invested in the family feud as she is.  Zoobi has a YouTube channel where she cooks recipes she's stolen form other chefs, and her daughter Roma (Zara Noor Abbas) is even more eager to pick fights.  Annu and Roma do most of the actual feuding, in fact; as the movie starts, Roma lets the air out of Annu's tires so she can reach a job interview before him, he shows up to confront her, and they argue so loudly and vehemently that they're both kicked out of the building.

Ahmad and Arshad are on separate business trips to Dubai, but it's really an excuse top spend some time together without their family being actively horrible to one another.  They're trying to find a way to heal the family rift, but everything changes when Fehmi faints and is diagnosed with a brain tumor.  The men rush home, and for a while, the feud is forgotten and Zoobi and Fehmi are as close as they ever were.  Fehmi is particularly interested in getting Annu married before she dies, and Zoobi agrees to help.

Meanwhile, Roma and Annu are speaking civilly to one another for perhaps the first time in their lives, and they maybe don't hate each other after all?  Maybe they love each other?  The transition from sworn enemies to secret love interests happens really quickly, though to be fair it's a relatively short TV movie and they need to get to the song already.  Also, they grew up in the same house so they don't need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other.

And then disaster strikes.  The sisters-in-law overhear their husbands bragging about their successful scheme to bring the family closer together and get Roma and Annu married by faking Fehmi's cancer diagnosis.  Rather than get mad at their husbands, which would be sensible because convincing someone they're terminally ill is a genuinely awful thing to do, they're mad at one another.  The feud is back on, and now they're competing to see who can get their child married first.  Will Roma and Annu find a way to be together?

No.  That's not how things work in this kind of family drama/romance.  They'll make some noble speeches and give up their love for the sake of their family, but other characters will have an offscreen change of heart and everything will work out in the end. These movies don't normally end with the young couple directly addressing the camera to tell the audience that Eid is a great time to reconcile with your family and settle all your differences, but Dil Tera Hogaya was originally presented as  a holiday special, so fair enough.

So, elephant in the room.  Arshad and Ahmad are brothers, which means that Roma and Annu are first cousins.  That's a cultural thing; cousin marriage is both legal and relatively common in Pakistan, and I am not going be critiquing a culture that is not my own here.  I will say that growing up in the same household does push the dynamic closer to squabbling siblings than I would like.

Elephants aside, this is very Nineties Bollywood family drama, with big emotions, lots of talk about family values, protagonists who are kind of terrible until they fall in love, and everyone getting forgiven in the end.  It's just shorter, with one song, a handful of sets, and a small cast who mostly live in the same house.