Baar Baar Dekho is a confused film. It tries so hard to be smart, savvy and good looking. But not a single aspect of the film lights up emotions or sends tragic signals down your veins. It’s About Time Bollywood realized that A Time Traveller’s Wife should never be Katrina Kaif. It has become so mundane and incredibly sad to see her speak, dance and even show us some mighty curves. But it’s not just Kaif’s fault here. Nitya Mehra’s film that’s about a ‘mathematician’ trapped in a ‘time-lapse’, doesn’t follow any laws governed by either. It neither works on logic nor does it want to. If only the director paid more attention to the plot and not the prosthetic hair, makeup and the VFX for the year 2034, this would have been at least watchable. But then again, that’s just me being overly hopeful for something that wouldn’t happen.
The bewildering idea of love at the time of uncommon time-travel is so half-assed and superficial that after like 20 odd minutes you stop paying attention. There is no soul, no heart and no mind put into this mind-numbing piece of a carcass that’s being sold as a high-concept love story. It’s best described as a science-fiction made by someone who has seen, maybe the above 2 mentioned science fiction films in their entire life’s existence. Anyone with a cohesive mind can pinpoint that there’s no moment of spark, fun or love to be had here.
Baar Baar Dekho is about Jai (Siddharth) a mathematician who teaches a class of ogling girls to miss out on his girlfriend’s art exhibition. About Diya (Katrina) an artist who never seems to have anything to her personality that’s even strikingly similar to an artist in the entirety of the film. Most of her time is spent on wearing revealing clothes, dancing and begging her better half into being less of a mathematician and more of a human being. In a complete swap of personality in Nitya’s film Jai comes across as a calculative bitch & Diya an over-indulgent lovelorn fool who just wishes to pave over her artistic abilities and succumb to living in the shadows of a man who has no sense of understanding and yet calls himself a genius.
Not only do I find it incredibly hard to digest the love between the two leads, their chemistry which is as lame as a donkey sitting on another donkey trying to make it run towards a third donkey, but because there’s no way the two people in the film could be understood to be compatible. Hence, Nitya forces a long montage of childhood love on our face. Forcing us to believe that love can blossom over ‘small things’. The most baffling thing, however, is the fact that the film unpacks to deliver a message that didn’t need to have a 2 and a half hour runtime. Hence, the perpetual state of mind of the protagonist never ceases to resolve issues, nor does it make things clear.
The film basically tells the prophecy that our grandmas have been telling us from back when human existences were made possible. It says that relationships and people are more important than ambitions. But the way Nitya Mehra’s film routes you into believing on her completely ill-mannered, morally obnoxious film makes for a terrible-terrible watch.
★
