Baar Baar Dekho
Year: 2016
Director: Nitya Mehra
Cast: Katrina Kaif, Siddharth Malhotra

What’s the plot?

They are childhood friends, in love and all set to marry. She (Katrina Kaif) is a talented painter. He (Siddharth Malhotra) is a brilliant mathematician. She values people and relationships. He only understands figures and equations. She wants to be in India, near her family. He wants to go abroad, be a Cambridge professor. She wants a happy married life. He wants a top notch career. Feeling all jittery on the eve of their wedding, he has a big fight with her and calls off the marriage. The next day, a strange thing happens- he wakes up into future. He keeps oscillating back and forth in future through different stages of his life, making him look at himself and his relationships in a new light. Where will this strange journey end?

What’s hot?

·       Director Nitya Mehra presents an interesting take on modern romances and marriages, offering a commentary on today’s self-centered, career-driven lives and disrupted families.

·       The future world depiction is imaginative and pretty neatly executed.

·       Katrina and Siddharth make a good pair of eye candies!

·       The supporting cast is competent.

·       It is a lavish Dharma production with pleasing foreign locales, excellent visual effects and superb cinematography.

·       The music and choreography add cinematic value.

What’s not?

·       The lead actors are woefully out of depth when it comes to emoting. Some of their ‘emotional’ scenes turn unintentionally comic!

·       The frequent back and forth switches in the narrative are jerky and confusing at times.

·       The film takes quite a while to become interesting.

Verdict

True to Dharma- tradition, Baar Baar Dekho provides a slick, contemporary, NRI-targeting ‘urban relationship drama’. The debutante director Nitya Mehra cleverly uses the time travel concept (reminiscent of The Groundhog Day) to ask questions about the ‘I or we’, ‘Work or family’ conundrum. But the overall limited acting skills of the lead pair come in the way of making it a better film.

Rating

2 stars