In "Pyar Mein Twist", scheduled for release in the first week of August, the most talked about star pair of the 1970s plays a twilight-zone couple who decide to marry at a time when their respective children are about to do the same much to the horror of Dimple's daughter Soha Ali Khan.
Sammir Dattani plays Soha's progressive boyfriend who openly supports his fiancée's mother's marriage plans.
It's a bold unconventional thought being pitched in an unorthodox way by the producers, Percept Pictures.
"We've decided to focus on the elder pair Rishi and Dimple. Though Sammir Dattani and Soha are pivotal to the plot, 'Pyar Mein Twist' is the elder couple's story," says Chithra Subramaniam of Percept.
Adds director Hriday Shetty (who earlier made the crime caper "Plan" for Sanjay Gupta): "For our generation of people, Rishi and Dimple are the ultimate love pair. All the other successful star pairs like Kumar Gaurav-Vijayata Pandit, Sanjay Dutt-Tina Munim and Hrithik Roshan-Ameesha were just following in Rishi-Dimple's steps. I'm pretty confident that there're enough people out there who want to see a love story between a mature couple."
As for Gen-X, the makers of "Pyar Mein Twist", are convinced they'd empathise enormously with Sammir Dattani's defiant support of the old couple's resolution to find happiness together in the autumn of their lives.
It has been 32 years since "Bobby". When in 1973 Raj Kapoor's youngest son Rishi Kapoor and Gujarati entrepreneur Chunnibhai Kapadia's elder daughter Dimple got together for the teenybopper love story called "Bobby", no one anticipated the nation's mass hysteria.
Every Indian wanted to see Rishi and Dimple together for ever. But Dimple, in an overnight turn of heart, decided to desert her "Bobby" co-star (who had a massive thing going for her in real life) and married then superstar Rajesh Khanna.
As the nation mourned the end of a romantic dream, Dimple gave up what was arguably the most promising
career ever for a female debutante to look after Khanna and their two daughters.Until 1985 when Ramesh Sagar pulled out a rabbit - and a bunny - from his hat in a self-indulgent romantic saga called "Sagar".
The return of the imperishable Rishi-Dimple pair and the much-vaunted romantic sequences didn't set the screen on fire. But there were enough diehard romantics out there to make "Sagar" a memorable romantic experience.
Now two decades after "Sagar", the Rishi-Dimple on-screen romance is being revived by enterprising filmmaker Hriday Shetty.
With the success of Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini's romantic coupling in Ravi Chopra's "Baghban", there seems to be enough reason to believe that another romance about an autumnal couple would work.
Can Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia revive the magic of "Hum tum ek kamre mein band hon aur chabhi kho jaye"? Or is the magic of their romance locked away and the 'chabhi' thrown into the 'Sagar' of mediocrity?
