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Every Imtiaz Ali opening feels like its own genre. Each feels sharper than the last until you circle back and realise the older one never stopped breathing. But revisit the new again, and it opens up, revealing something you missed. This cycle goes on, and it will, as long as there are movies and as long as Ali keeps pulling us under in those first few moments: where life isn’t just shown, it spills over. With his longtime, glorious editor Aarti Bajaj, he doesn’t just set the tone. They stretch the form, dragging you into the mess and ache of being alive. Yet, beneath that mastery, there’s a sense that they, too, are caught. There’s a sense that they, too, are swept away by the same wild currents they bring to the screen. There’s a sense that they are chasing something cinema can barely contain.
Shock, Grief, Awe
Look at Amar Singh Chamkila’s opening. It doesn’t just shock, it shakes you loose. First, there’s the killing. Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh) and Amarjot (Parineeti Chopra) gunned down in broad daylight. But before the weight of their death settles, the screen slips into black and white. Chamkila, now dressed in ethereal white, stands like a ghostly troubadour — performing, perhaps, in some imagined heaven. Just as you begin to grasp this surreal farewell, Bajaj’s cut hurls you back — to a young Chamkila, wide-eyed, absorbing the rawness of the world around him. And then, without warning, you return to the aftermath. Their lifeless bodies sprawled like casualties of a war no one saw coming. It’s a battlefield frozen in shock, the kind of silence Kurosawa once captured. Grief looms in the air, and those who witnessed it cower unseen.
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But Bajaj doesn’t stop. The rhythm shifts again. Mohit Chauhan steps into the frame, breaks the fourth wall, and with a sly smile, begins ‘Baaja’. Suddenly, the tone turns playful and cheekier, unburdened by reverence. All of Punjab bursts into the song. Rival singers, truck drivers, schoolgirls, hockey players. Each voice passing the tune like a Chinese whisper. And as expected, the innovation doesn’t stop either. The screen fractures into split frames. Archival footage bleeds into animation. Intertitles flash across the chaos. It’s cinema, yes. But also something wilder, older? Like a Greek chorus echoing through time? Is this fiction, you think? Or nonfiction? Perhaps, hybrid? Nobody knows. Maybe even Bajaj and Ali wouldn’t dare to answer.
One Writes, Other Rewrites
The opening is potent for many reasons. Chief among them is how vividly it captures the magic that happens when Ali and Bajaj come together to tell a story. It also makes one thing undeniably clear: as Ali completes 20 years in the film industry (his debut Socha Na Tha released on March 4, 2005), he remains, in many ways, incomplete without Bajaj. Because his characters are such complex beasts, they can’t just be written; they must be rewritten. And no one does that better than Bajaj. No one else could shape his wild, sprawling ideas with such clarity and abandon as her. And no one knows him as intimately as she does. But beyond their creative synergy, this opening distils the heart of their shared artistic pursuit — to tell stories in a way that is as layered and restless as life itself, refusing simplicity, embracing the mess, and finding truth in all its jagged edges.
(Diljit Dosanjh in Amar Singh Chamkila)
Just as Amar Singh Chamkila is crafted like a folktale, woven from the many voices and pieces of a beloved yet controversial figure, the same holds true for how Bajaj and Ali approach their films. Their gaze is never fixed; it shifts, evolves, questions. It feels as though they are trying to understand their characters in real time. It feels as though they are grappling with their contradictions as they shape them. It feels as though in the editing room, this becomes an act of discovery: a process of mixing, matching, and throwing things at the screen, hoping to peel back the layers and see their subjects more closely.
Let Coherence Eat Cake
In a way, it mirrors the essence of Ali’s stories where love is not just a feeling but a test, something his characters must prove themselves worthy of. Similarly, through every frame, every cut, Bajaj and Ali seem to be proving to themselves that they are worthy of telling these stories. And in doing so, they seem indifferent to coherence or continuity. Whether it becomes difficult to follow or too much to take in is of little concern. Because they are not chasing clarity; they are searching for meaning. Their structures are non-linear not out of a narrative necessity, but from a deeper, more restless need to find the narrative itself, piece by piece.
Time and space—the very anchors of cinematic storytelling—are tossed into the air by Bajaj. In her hands, they lose their grip, as timelines blur and spatial rules dissolve. Take Love Aaj Kal, the second collaboration between Bajaj and Ali. It was the first glimpse of their shared fascination with time’s slipperiness. The film opens in London: two strangers share a lift, then a dance, then a kiss in a car. By the next day, they’re following each other on social media. Soon, they’re shopping together, falling into a relationship that stretches over a year. Smooth jump cuts and dissolves pulling us through their casual love.
A Magic Of Sorts
But the true sleight of hand arrives with the first song. As the credits roll, the film fractures. The couple reappears across different phases of their lives, scattered across cities, while another love story unfolds in sepia-toned memory. San Francisco’s slick roads morph into Old Delhi’s dusty lanes; the Golden Gate dissolves into the Howrah Bridge. It’s the first Bajaj montage in an Ali film. She does something similar in the iconic opening montage of Rockstar. It begins with Jordan (Ranbir Kapoor), poised to perform at his own concert. But before we can hear him, the film jumps into his past. We see him not as the brooding rockstar but as Janardhan Jakhar: wide-eyed and unpolished, auditioning for a college contest, singing the same song with the same aching voice. From there, the montage hurtles forward, glimpsing his evolution—performing in recording studios, clubs, and concert halls. He sings for those at dargahs and jagratas, in brothels, but also in solitude.
His hair grows, his beard thickens, his voice deepens. Each frame marks a change, a journey that the film will chase, not in order, but in ruptures. It is, in many ways, a bold and defiant move. To reveal the very highlights the film will later explore in some detail. Indeed, this style mirrors the turbulence of Jordan’s life, his contradictions, his restlessness. More than that, it signals a refusal to deliver a clean, coherent portrait. Instead, it offers fragments, leaving the audience to stitch together the man he becomes. But beneath this structural daring lies something deeper. A glimpse into Ali and Bajaj’s enduring preoccupation with broken timelines, emotional truths over factual precision, reveals their belief that a person’s essence cannot be captured through a neat, linear biography. Their cinema suggests that life—any life—cannot be told in order. It must be felt in pieces.
The Ever-Stunning Drama In Tamasha
With their playful disregard for space, there is, of course, the magnetic ‘Heer Toh Badi Sad Hai’ from Tamasha. Tara (Deepika Padukone) returns from Corsica to Kolkata, her hometown. But the song cuts elsewhere, unfolding in Punjab, where a band of sardars acts like a Greek chorus. It captures Tara’s heartbreak across five years of a life dulled by routine. But underneath, it feels like Bajaj and Ali are asking: why should Tara, being in Kolkata, stop the song from playing in Punjab? Wasn’t that where Heer was from? And aren’t all stories, no matter how far apart, woven from the same longing, the same heartbreak? This question also forms the fundamental editing pattern of both the film and another stunning opening—‘Chali Kahaani’: a seamless blend of fantasy and reality.
(A still from Tamasha)
We see young Ved (Yash Sehgal), whose mind constantly mixes the mythical with the mundane. In his home and school corridors, he imagines Ram and Sita, Helen and Paris, Soni and Mahiwal. All these timeless lovers form his everyday world. Amid these visions, a fleeting glimpse of his future self (Ranbir Kapoor) also appears—yearning, while his Heer, Tara, waits quietly at a doorstep. His mind overflows with images, alive with imagination and a deep love for stories. And without realising it, he is already writing his own epic, one that will unravel in ways even he cannot yet comprehend. In a way, it’s Bajaj and Ali teasing us again—not with where this story will eventually go, but with a bigger question: how will we get there? As with all great cinema, the journey matters more than the destination.
Montages, But Not Really
This opening also reveals something essential about their artistic method. Bajaj’s editing often treats entire scenes like extended montages. But not in the conventional sense of classical Hollywood or découpage. Her approach leans closer to the principles of Soviet montage: where meaning doesn’t emerge from individual shots but from their collision. These juxtapositions are not seamless but confrontational, creating a dialectical tension where images clash in tone, continuity, and thematic weight. Because Bajaj isn’t content with surface-level meaning. Her cuts seek a deeper resonance. They seek to move beyond the connotative (the literal, what is shown) to the denotative (the implied, what stays beneath).
Nowhere is this more potent than in Amar Singh Chamkila’s ‘Ishq Mithaye’. The picturisation is replete with contradictions. Shots of riots and violence rub against images of people dancing at Chamkila’s akhadas. Even the lyrics symbolise this duality—“Ishq Mithaye… Ishq Banaye” (love that breaks…love that makes). And then comes the line that haunts like a protest cry, “Main Hoon Punjab” (I Am Punjab). It carries the same raw, defiant spirit as ‘Sadda Haq’ from Rockstar. It’s a profoundly self-aware moment. Both Chamkila and Jordan create art that inevitably becomes political, much like Bajaj and Ali, whose artistry is laced with a silent rebellion, revealing its politics when you least expect it.
The Disorienting Leap In Rockstar
Another crucial aspect of Bajaj and Ali’s storytelling is their tendency to return to the same visuals repeatedly. But each time, they reveal something deeper. Take ‘Phir Se Udd Chala’ from Rockstar, for instance. The song erupts seemingly out of nowhere. Just moments ago, Jordan was in Kashmir at Heer’s (Nargis Fakhri) wedding, and now, he’s soaring on wings of fame. The sudden leap is disorienting on first viewing. But as the film revisits these images in their supposed continuity, a clearer truth emerges—Jordan isn’t just ascending through stardom, he’s transcending reality itself, propelled by a longing to return to Heer.
(A still from the song ‘Heer To Badi Sad Hai’)
The imagery isn’t arbitrary. He is the parinda. He is the bird with wings on fire (not coincidentally, it’s also the name of his concert tour). This recurring motif suggests that his fame is not liberation but an affliction. His flight is not about escaping the past but circling back to the one thing he cannot let go of. And Bajaj is simply trying to capture this spirit through her transitions. This holds true for all of Ali’s characters. They all are the “bade janwar” (the wild beasts) who resist being tamed or contained. So, her editing doesn’t attempt to confine them; instead, she tries to hold them still, if only for a moment—to understand them a little better. But just as quickly, she sets them free again, allowing them to determine their own destinies. This instinct is perhaps most evident in the way she chooses to end an Ali film.
When The Characters Live, Love, Speak
She seeks to bookend every Ali film, but not in the traditionally understood sense. If the opening mostly takes us through a character’s destiny in highlights, the closing allows the character to navigate their own life, in its totality. If the opening is about Bajaj defining their lives through her cuts; the closing is about characters dictating what comes next. Rockstar, for instance. If the opening is all about Jordan’s musical career, his art and his rise to fame, then the closing is about him as an artist, with his true muse, Heer, and his pursuit of love. Similarly, if the opening of Amar Singh Chamkila is filled with the voices of an entire Punjab offering their opinions about Chamkila, the closing is reserved for him, where he finally gets to share his thoughts on the listeners who never truly heard him.
Sometimes, in the closing bits, she grants her characters the power to rewrite their pasts. Sometimes in reality, like both versions of Love Aaj Kal. Sometimes in imagination, like Tamasha, where Ved, as both man and child, finally moves through his world unbound. It is very much like Jordan; he soars through corridors, and as Irshad Kamil writes, “Purana bhi, naya bhi hai” (such that is old, and new too). In her own way, Bajaj honours this line, allowing the past and present to fold into each other. And it is in these songs where her craft sings the loudest. There, the rhythm becomes her language. This is why she works so seamlessly with Ali. Because there is always music in his frames, even when there isn’t. Their stories are always the same; it is the two who keep changing with every film, trying to seek not only their characters, their stories, and but perhaps even themselves.
(Anas Arif is a film writer and a media graduate from AJKMCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
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