Baar Baar Dekho

Baar Baar Dekho is this time travel movie that tries to lecture the audience about the significance of giving up a little bit of your ambition for the sake of your family life. I don’t wish to sound like an egoistic male chauvinist, but the kind of one sided blaming politics this movie had was sort of discomforting for me. It has this realistic tone in depicting the life of the posh upper class people, but the screenplay isn’t truly gripping and thus Baar Baar Dekho from debutant Nitya Mehra is just an okay film.

Jai Varma and Diya Varma are our main protagonists. They were childhood friends who ended up in a relationship and decided to get married. A confused Jai gets drunk on the eve of his wedding after having a quarrel with Diya and the next day when he wakes up, it was already 10 days after the marriage. This time travel scenario repeats and he gets to live almost 30 years in the future going back and forth. How this journey shapes his attitude towards life, relationships and commitments is what Baar Baar Dekho mainly about.

The basic aim is to tell all those workaholics or career oriented people about the significance of giving time to minimal things in life. Sri Rao’s story has that smart and ambitious approach towards the theme to make it look cinematically interesting. But the screenplay is a bit of an exhausting experience. We are seeing this aw struck confused Sidharth Malhotra for a long time in this movie and by the time the film reaches its second half, we are kind of losing the excitement on knowing what would happen when he wakes up this time.

Sidharth Malhotra is partially convincing as this Mathematics obsessed guy.  A little finer tuning was required in his performance. Katrina Kaif looks extremely stunning and in terms of performance as well she has done a good job. It was good to see Sarika in that mother character. Ram Kapoor hasn’t got much of a screen time to create an impact.

Nitya Mehra who assisted in movies like Life of Pi and Reluctant Fundamentalist, pitches the story the way Hollywood rom-coms do. There is very less background score and there isn’t too much of a melodrama happening here. At times the dialogues by Anvita Dutt is a bit “Dharmatic”, but it is bearable. Like I said, it is the less gripping elaborate screenplay with all those back and forth episodes that decelerates the movie. At some areas we as an audience feel why the hero is not getting the point. Ravi K Chandran gives that luxurious feel to every frame. While some of the technologies they presented in the movie to visualize future was impressive, there are a few which weren’t that convincing (the colored hair for eg.). Prosthetics aided makeup looked convincing on the main characters while we could clearly see the lack of perfection in the makeup of the co actors. Music department has got some catchy tunes and the minimal BGMs were also nice.

Nitya Mehra manages to create an impact as a director with Baar Baar Dekho. The film has its moments for sure, but they are far away from each other and thus there isn’t much of an enthusiasm in Baar Baar Dekho.

Rating : 2.5/5