Bareilly Ki Barfi: Fails to leave an aftertaste


At the end of Bareilly Ki Barfi, you are neither amused nor surprised. Rather you wonder what the movie was all about. It's a film without an underlying theme and with a thin plot. 

Kriti Sanon represents everything that a girl shouldn't be in Bareilly, someone who smokes, drinks, stays out till late and is brash and outspoken. Her engagement has been called off twice and her mother cannot wait to see her married. No boy, however, seems to accept her for the way she is. Irritated with such pressure and being judged constantly, she tries to run away and buys a novel at the railway station. 

Incidentally, it has passages that exactly depict the person that she is. Impressed that someone can see her as being normal, she tries to find its writer. The hunt takes her to the book's publisher, Ayushmann Khurrana, who has actually written the book, inspired by his girlfriend, after a heartbreak. However, he does not want his name to be associated with it and therefore uses timid friend Rajkummar Rao's name and picture on it instead. 

The film then goes down the predictable path where Ayushmann falls in love with Sanon while she is attracted to Rao. The story just drags along thereafter with the odd enjoyable moment. Any regular movie watcher can predict what happens in the end. The performances are just about passable barring that of Rao who clearly shines with his twin shades as a person. 

The only good part of the film is that it's a light entertainer and at just over two hours, a time pass one-time watch. Don't go expecting some brilliance or great storytelling. While Bareilly Ki Barfi does not leave a bitter taste, it certainly has some important ingredients missing.

 - Kunal Purandare

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sanju - A one-dimensional PR stunt

Image
Newspaper articles can be written with an angle. Books can take sides. And movies can be made with a slant. Sanju clearly has one: That everyone else, but the actor is responsible for his misdeeds. What the film tells us is that his drug addiction was because of the wrong company that he kept, keeping an AK-47 rifle (given to him by terrorist Abu Salem) in his car was to protect his family which was being threatened (although his father continued to do community work in the open) and his jail term and subsequent vilification was because of a vicious media trial.  There’s nothing wrong in making a movie trying to clean up the image of one of Indian cinema’s controversial personalities. But it has to be done with adequate depth and conviction. Rajkumar Hirani – believed to be one of the finest filmmakers of our times – falls woefully short on these fronts. And by using clichéd lines like ‘ kuch toh log kahenge ’ to refer to the adverse public opinion about the actor, he dil...
Read more

Hichki - Let's do the cha cha cha for Rani

Image
Rani Mukerji prefers to be a part-time animator till the time she gets a job as a school teacher. That, however, is an uphill task given the fact that she suffers from Tourette syndrome – a neurological condition which results in her making some peculiar sounds like cha cha cha , often in the middle of completing a sentence. Her application has been rejected by several institutes and her father, too, is unsympathetic to her disorder. A reputed school in which she had studied offers her a post mid-term because no teacher is able to handle the class that she has been assigned to look after. The Right to Education Act compels the school to enrol students from the lower strata of society for whom the institute is more a place for recreation than to study. Rani latches on to the opportunity with the belief that she can be the torchbearer of change. A rival professor, played by Neeraj Kabi, has no hopes whatsoever and challenges Rani to prove him wrong. Unsurprisingly, it’s ba...
Read more