A postmortem of 'Baar Baar Dekho'

Often crystal stones can hide amidst diamonds but when they are all by themselves, the lie gets noticed and they are exposed, sometimes too easily. While this could be a poor analogy to make, Siddhartha Malhotra and Katrina Kaif suffers from a similar fate in 'Baar Baar Dekho'.

The two actors with tremendous screen presence flourished in scenes where they have to dance, sing and act all cutie-pie but fails when have to emote raw human emotions. Better actors would have hold on the attention for longer time. Of course, even that perhaps would not have been enough to save this film because of the poor script and screenplay.

In Indian film industry, we have not experimented with the idea of time travel or repetition of a day like in films 'GroundHog day' or 'Time travellers wife'. So in that respect, there was novelty in the idea for Indian audience. But it is a cut-throat world where implementation matters more than intentions and the film doesn't deliver much in that respect.

Like most rom-com from Dharma productions, the film is bright and vibrant in colours and texture and looks very slick with good music. But the banality of all that happens in the script is a problem.

The fact that the protagonist skipping timeline of his life is the main plot of the film, it is introduced too late and with comic treatment. The film lacks in enough twists and details that can create the confusion which needs a resolution in the end and drags to deliver the message.

Also Jay being a mathematical genius doesn't affect the film in anyway. His ambition to research on vedic time travel also doesn't affect because it wasn't actually a time travel film like 'About time' or Time Travellers Wife. It was more of magic realism.

If the character would have used his knowledge of vedic science to resolve this problem then it would have mattered. It was afterall more a story of an ambitious man who doesn't give time to family to follow his dream but he not realising it for most parts is a rare stupidity that doesn't suit such a mathematical genius.

Baar Baar Dekho is not the worst film that have been made on relationship but it lacks clarity and enough punch to entertain or interest the audience. So another opportunity lost because it had potential of being something different for Indian film industry.

Sadly for Katrina, after 'Fitoor' it is her second flop. Both films had interesting story line but lacked implementation. For Siddhartha, it is a wake up call to work harder on his acting skills to come back stronger with his next film.