Sweety (Sonam Kapoor), a lesbian, who for obvious reasons is afraid to come out of her closet. She's a shining student and her family is looking out for suitable 'guys' for her. Her brother is aware of her secret since years and chooses to remain silent with a hope that he'll be able to 'change' her. She meets Sahil Mirza (Rajkummar Rao), who starts falling for her.

In a scene early on in 'Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga' (ELKDTAL), Sweety (Sonam K. Ahuja), a chance spectator of writer Sahil Mirza's (Rajkummar Rao) play, tells him why it doesn't work for her - the love story doesn't have enough siyappa (trouble, turbulence). "Feels kaise aayegi (how will you get the right feeling for the romance)?" she asks rhetorically. That's exactly what is amiss in ELKDTAL itself.

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga opens on such a homogenous, generic note - amidst celebrations during a big, fat Punjabi wedding - that you'd never guess the unlikely direction it's headed in. Unless that was exactly the point. Because, frankly, the film, directed by Shelly Chopra Dhar who has co-written the screenplay with Gazal Dhaliwal, is both admirable and mildly frustrating. It prides itself on being the first mainstream Hindi film to put same-sex love at the centre of the story.

Vinod Chopra Films and Fox Star Studios' Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (UA) is a love story of an unusual kind. Balbir Chaudhury (Anil Kapoor) lives with his daughter, Sweety (Sonam Kapoor Ahuja), son, Babloo (Abhishek Duhan), and mother, Bijee (Madhumalti Kapoor). Balbir runs a garments business. Sahil Mirza (Rajkumar Rao) is a stage-play writer whom success has been eluding. A chance meeting between Sahil and Sweety creates a misunderstanding in the mind of Babloo that his sister, Sweety, is in love with Sahil who is Muslim.

EK LADKI KO DEKHA TOH AISA LAGA is the story of a girl wanting to love but is not allowed to due to societal pressures. Sweety (Sonam Kapoor Ahuja) lives in Moga, Punjab and is the daughter of Balbir Singh Chaudhury (Anil Kapoor), who runs a big garment factory. She completes her graduation and Balbir starts hunting for a suitable groom for her to marry. Sweety's authoritative brother Babloo (Abhishek Duhan) however realizes that Sweety secretly is in love with someone.

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga is an ingenious title. It alludes to the attractive imagery playing in the beholder's imagination as well as our assumptions on learning those eyes are hers and not his. Same sex love isn't a frequently broached topic in Hindi cinema. More often than not, it's an exercise in caricature to score distasteful laughs.

The grandmother's name is Gifty Chaudhury. Played memorably by Madhumalti Kapoor, she is quite the package: a matriarch who orders her son out of the kitchen, and tucks all objects of importance inside her cavernous blouse. Yet the name exhibits a certain mindset, one where women of the house are considered presents and trophies, objects of adornment as opposed to action. When Gifty's son wants to marry off his daughter - named Sweety - his wishlist for a groom includes the word 'gundeya,' to imply toughness, as he wants a man who can take care of his girl.

Perhaps, for the first time, mainstream Bollywood cinema has set its heart free, and accepted the ecstasy, danger and the beauty of same-sex love in elegantly heartfelt and emotionally absorbing drama that breaks moulds, changes paths as it takes a significant step towards acceptance, love, humanity and kindness. Gone are those references, flash of sequences and jokes. EK LADKI KO DEKHA TOH AISA LAGA is most bold, beautiful and heartfelt love saga in recent years coming in mainstream Bollywood.

One Word Review... EkLadkiKoDekhaTohAisaLaga: BRAVE! Good to see unconventional themes being given dignity by mainstream actors... Will surely trigger debates about love and life... Anil, Juhi, Rajkummar, Sonam, Abhishek Duhan are top notch.

What might a conservative Hindu consider even more objectionable than the daughter of the family marrying a Muslim man? Answer: how about the girl being in love with another girl? The spotlight on this ridiculous, tragi-comic hierarchy of biases is one of the many winning aspects of writer-director Shelly Chopra Dhar's Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga. To bracket it as simply an LGBT-themed film or an inter-community romance would be what the protagonist herself might call an "upar upar waali" (superficial) reading of it though.

The makers were somewhat successful in raising the curiosity of the viewers when 'Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga's (ELKDTAL) first trailer was unveiled. Directed by Shelly Chopra Dhar, this 'secret' love story of Sonam Kapoor aka Sweet Chaudhary ushers in a kind of new-age romance which the audience has not seen so far in Bollywood.

Shelly Chopra Dhar's Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga poses a challenge to both critics and viewers. How much can the reviewer reveal about the plot, which unveils its big twist at the exact point at which you are encouraged to shuffle out of the auditorium to the popcorn counter? And what does the average moviegoer make of the subversion of the soppy romance in which boy falls for girl and gets the prize after leaping over a series of obstacles?

This film couldn't have had a better title. It is the 'mukhda' of a song made madly popular more than 30 years ago when a boy ('ek ladka') saw a girl ('ek ladki') and burst out into song. That film was called 1942: A Love Story, and that 'ladka', all grown up now, plays the grizzled father (Kapoor) in this film, to his real-life daughter (Ahuja), a lovely connection that only the movies can make happen.

Take this story to the smallest of towns. Let the Sweetys in every village and every town know that they are normal. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga is an attempt at 'normalising' everyone who is 'not normal'. It is for the ones who are shunned, who are never accepted into the fold of 'mainstream' society. The love stories that are not spoken about. The Lihaafs that are persecuted and the Gobin Markets that men don't want.

The first mainstream Hindi film that, somewhat tremulously, broaches the theme of same-sex love, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga is easy to relate to and grasp despite, or may be owing to, its essentially sanitised veneer. It sails to uncharted parts and travels miles, but it does so without rocking the boat too violently. In the end, it is a sensitive, tender and humour-laced melodrama that hinges as much on the relationship between a lonely, misunderstood small-town Punjab girl and her doting father as on the heroine's sexual orientation, which drives her into a difficult-to-break shell.

Sweety (Sonam K Ahuja) runs into Sahil Mirza (Rajkummar Rao) at a theatre in Delhi and for him, it's love at first sight. While at that point she is running away in a chase, he decides to pursue her and shifts base to Moga, Punjab. Once he proposes to Sweety, the story unfolds as he finds out that she is in love with somebody else.