Expectations are bound to be high from a film that marks the first time collaboration between two giants like Dharma Productions and Excel Entertainment. Though ‘Baar Baar Dekho’ is Nitya Mehra’s first film as a director, she has assisted/served as an associate to the biggest of filmmakers in the country and has also helmed a couple of episodes for Anil Kapoor’s ’24 India’. The trailer of the film, in my opinion caught everyone’s attention, which many inferred that this film, a romantic drama based on the concept of time travel, will have an array of emotions to offer.
Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) and Diya (Katrina Kaif) are childhood sweethearts and their bond has grown from strength to strength over the several years they have known each other. While Jai is a career driven man, Diya’s priority is their relationship. One day, Diya proposes marriage to Jai who, at first, gives in to the idea of getting married but later, repents it. After having an altercation with Diya because of their conflicting thoughts, Jai binges on alcohol and passes out. The next day, he wakes up in a resort in Thailand. Soon, he gets to know that Diya and him have come to Thailand for their honeymoon. What baffles Jai is the fact that he does not have any memory of them getting married. The last thing he remembers was when Dia and he had a fight and he passed out after having copious amount of alcohol.
While the concept of the film, from what one gathered from the promos, seemed interesting enough to be used to put together a feature film, the film fails miserably to conceive any theory to convince you of the time travelling bit. The other major issue is the writers get so busy playing around with the concept, they pay no attention to characterisation and building up situations that would arouse emotions in the viewer. Firstly, you do not know the characters and their issues well enough to sympathise with them. The ease with which Jai solves the issues in their relationship by travelling back and forth in time seems too incongruous for one to digest. The concept of time travel coupled with the emotional quotient the film had the potential to be weaved along, could have culminated into a heart-warming love story which would had the beats of a romantic thriller. Unfortunately, neither the sci-fi bit nor the relationship between the main characters conjures any kind of emotion within you.
Sidharth Malhotra shows marginal improvement in his acting skills and not as stiff as he was in his earlier films. Katrina Kaif is burdened with some heavy duty emotional scenes which put her limited acting skills to test. This is probably the most gorgeous she has ever looked in any film but an actor of a higher calibre would have been a better choice here.
Nitya Mehra and her team of technicians put together a visually stunning film. But that alone cannot save a film which has been saddled with an outrageously silly script filled with a plethora of implausible events. DoP Ravi Chandran offers you numerous stunning frames to drool to as the otiose narrative tests your patience. The songs (Amaal Mallik, Jasleen Royal, Arko, Badshah, Bilal Saeed) are of differing quality and it is the background score (Sameer Uddin) that towers above them.
The title of the film roughly translates to ‘watch it again and again’. Watching the film once turns out to be such an excruciatingly painful experience, that one shudders at the thought of repeated viewings.
Rating: 1.5/5
