Does Ranbir Kapoor have a thing for older women (at least on screen)?
From dancing with a 46-year-old Madhuri Dixit-Nene in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani to romancing a 42-year-old Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Ranbir Kapoor simply cannot stop himself when it comes to older women.
A lot of noise has been made about 33-year-old Ranbir Kapoor romancing and acting in intimate scenes with the much older Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in director Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. It is not everyday that a young heartthrob gets mushy with older women in Bollywood.
The story of a young man falling for an older women has created cinematic history time and again. From the 1967 Hollywood film The Graduate to the 2001 Cannes Award-winning erotic thriller The Piano teacher, the tale of a young man getting seduced by a more mature and wiser woman has always had takers.
However, in a country as prudish as India, pushing the envelope on the aforementioned lines in cinema is rather a big deal.
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But then, Ranbir Kapoor has always been about pushing the boundaries. He began his career with the gloomy, tragic love story Saawariya and did a film as unconventional as Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year right at the beginning of his nine-year-old Bollywood career.
So, when Ranbir was paired opposite National Award winning actor Konkona Sen Sharma in Ayan Mukerji's Wake Up Sid, eyebrows were raised and people were not too sure about this pairing. But it worked like magic. Ranbir has the uncanny ability to make his co-actors comfortable and the back-and-forth banter between him and the older Konkona came together really well on screen.
Ayan Mukerji then took it a little further. He got Madhuri Dixit-Nene to agree to do an item song in his next film Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013). And who danced opposite him? Well, Ranbir. Ranbir and Madhuri looked like a million bucks on screen and the song Ghagra and its video became a huge hit.
Now, Ranbir is romancing (in all its hues) Aishwarya in Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and it simply falls in line with Ranbir's other unconventional choices, like doing Barfi! or Bombay Velvet. Ranbir is seen as a stoic, far older than his age, and as such, he seems to get along pretty well with older women. Here's hoping Ranbir Kapoor gets a full-fledged film where he is just romancing an old woman with no Anushka or Deepika around.