Bareilly Ki Barfi

One key reason why I loved Bareilly Ki Barfi even after the plot being slightly silly is the fact that they gave a commendable space to the character of Pritam Vidrohi played by Rajkumar Rao. Narrated as a simple small town love story with complications, Bareilly Ki Barfi is hilarious occasionally and entirely sweet. With actors delivering top notch performances, this Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari movie is never a boring one.

Bitti is this small town girl who isn’t like the other girls. She smokes, drinks, dances on her roof top and eats non veg. Her parents have concern about her future and one day Bitti finds a book that sort of has a female character that is pretty much similar to her. The search to find the author of that book ends up in her meeting with Chirag Dubey, the publisher of that book. Chirag gets attracted to Bitti and the plot becomes interesting when Pritam Vidrohi, the author of the book comes into the equation. How things go for Chirag after that is what Bareilly Ki Barfi showing us.

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari captures the ambience of the small town world so beautifully that you just get invested in this simple story. The conversations are totally hilarious. Even the slightly over romantic last act has some quirks to put a smile on our face. The film is light, but the sweetness comes to the narrative naturally. In just one or two scenes Ashwiny and her team smartly establishes the lovely relationship between Bitti and her dad. And like I said in the beginning, Rajkumar Rao’s character isn’t a mere joker and the screenplay gives enough space to address the insecurities of such a guy. When every other department manages to please you, you might get the feeling that the story could have been a little more real.

Ayushmann Khurrana underplays the role of Chirag Dubey neatly. Chirag has this cheesy Romeo side and harsh bully side and the actor convincingly plays these parts. The pretty looking Kriti Sanon also gets in to the character effortlessly. Her looks and portrayal makes Bitti a really sweet character and undoubtedly the best one she did in her 4 film old career. Pankaj Tripathi as the silently caring father who shares his concerns to the ceiling fan at night was terrific. Seema Bhargava as the mother and Rohit Chaudhary as the earth of the hero were also good in their roles. The star of the show by the way was the super talented Rajkumar Rao. There is a particular scene in the film were we get to see the shy Vidrohi becoming the badass one and the shift was so graceful that the small multiplex audience with whom I saw the film actually whistled. He manages to change the tone of Vidrohi effortlessly.

Like I said, the movie captures the feel of the small town and the connect and attitude of characters very smartly. The conversations have that natural humor to its credit and Ashwiny makes all the events look real. The whole idea is built over the tried and tested misunderstanding/confusion formula. And that is the only and considerably big weak point of this movie. But still the writers of the film (which includes Dangal director Nitish Tiwari) are trying to answer some of the arguable questions. Cinematographer nicely captures the small town environment. The music in the movie is also quite sweet and energetic.

Like the title of the movie, Bareilly Ki Barfi is a simple and sweet film which has enough humor and performances to keep us smiling for its runtime of two hours. I never found the film boring even though I felt the story could have been more endearing.

Rating: 3/5