Audient Bollywood: Baar Baar Dekho

This is the seventh in my 2022 monthly series Audient Bollywood, in which I educate myself on Bollywood by watching notable examples of it.

As you may recall, I've been using a list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers (published in TimeOut) as guidance in making my dozen choices in this series. I won't get to all of the ten films -- length and availability are relevant factors -- but my July movie marks my third selection from that list so far.

It also marks the first time the list has steered me wrong, in terms of both the quality of the movie and the quality of the dance number. 

Or if this is one of the ten best Bollywood dance numbers of all time, I've got some disappointment ahead of me in the five remaining slots in this series.

The dance sequence selected on this list is the song "Kala Chashma" from the 2016 film Baar Baar Dekho, directed by Nitya Mehra. Oh, it's not a terrible number at all, but it's got a couple things going against it that I consider to be rather serious demerits:

1) It comes during the closing credits rather than being part of the narrative proper. That just seems like cheating. And because so many Hollywood romantic comedies have taken to having their characters dance over the closing credits, it felt hackneyed and obvious, even if Baar Baar Dekho might have slightly preceded that trend.

2) The primary "innovation" in its choreography seems to be people bobbing their heads from side to side. (Is it considered "bobbing" if the heads are going side to side? I wanted to say "wiggling" but that sounded even less right.)

Here, you can judge for yourself whether you think this is a great dance number:

Now, one thing I've discovered during Audient Bollywood is that a Bollywood dance number is a superfluous narrative flourish in the best of times. It almost always interrupts the action at sort of absurd moments, perhaps even to a greater degree than in the western musical because there's almost no attempt made to incorporate it into the narrative proper. It's much more like a stand-alone video than an offshoot of the action, and the lyrics rarely even seem to be elucidating anything in the story -- and I can tell this because I've been seeing them all translated in the subtitles. In fact there's one song in this movie that talks a lot about crispy potatoes. 

But a pure Bollywood dance number -- like I've seen enough Bollywood to make such a judgment -- is indeed part of the movie proper, not just an end credits dance sequence that's essentially designed to show how much all the people in the cast like each other and how much fun they had making the movie. So says I.

Since even if you watched that clip, you probably have no idea what sort of story it's accompanying, I might as well get into the plot now. And on this front the film had significant promise.

It follows the story of Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) and Diya (Katrina Kaif), who have been in each others' lives forever -- we open on them both being born in different hospitals in 1986, and the credits are a montage of their childhood growing up together and becoming romantically inclined toward one another. By the time they are young adults, they're still gaga over each other, but he -- skittish male that he is -- starts to worry about the commitment of marriage she's hinting at. He spouts divorce figures and also secretly harbors an interest in moving to England to take a job at Cambridge University. He knows she'll never go for this because she's very close to her family.

So as their wedding approaches, he starts to flake -- and then he starts to lose time. This was the promising part, since you know I like movies about what I call "the uncontrollable slippage of time." I was at first reminded of the 2021 Australian film Long Story Short, in which a newly married man wakes up each morning one further year into his marriage than he was the day before. In fact, I looked it up to try to see if there was a connection between the two, because Jai first wakes up ten days into his honeymoon, not remembering how he got to that point, and then the next day, two years into his marriage after this wife's water breaks. And you can tell they haven't been two happy years because she's really pissed with him and they're living in Cambridge, those two things probably being related to one another.

I couldn't find a connection between this and Long Story Short, and if there had been, it would have obviously been the other way around, with Long Story Short taking its concept from this. In fact, the connection is with the Adam Sandler movie Click -- one of my classic "uncontrollable slippage of time" movies -- as Wikipedia states that Baar Baar Dekho was inspired by the Sandler flick.

If so, they probably should have just gone with an exact Bollywood remake, magical remote control and all, because the execution of the concept is pretty scattershot. There's only a rudimentary explanation given for how much time Jai is moving forward each day, and why -- he's a gifted mathematician with a Rain Man-like ability to do instantaneous calculations, and in one of those "standing at a white board" scenes he works out some sort of exponential increase in the jumps, though it's essentially waved off as unimportant. The thing about high concept films is that you sort of have to create rules and then obey them, or else it just feels all over the place -- like this film.

And then at one point he goes backward to an earlier point, but then forward again, and it really gives the impression that the screenwriters are just making it up as they go. Maybe they were. 

Which, as I suggested earlier, would probably be okay if it was propped up by some really great dance numbers. There is one dance number I did like, which I thought was going to be the one that made the top ten list. That would have at least been something.

I did enjoy the lead performers for the most part, her more than him. The movie flirts with poignancy from time to time, and I liked what it was trying to do, but it just didn't get there. 

But hey, at least it was only 135 minutes long -- which is puny by Bollywood standards.

In August I hope to catch a movie on the fly on my return trip from the U.S. I'll be flying back on August 20th and I have to assume Qantas has plenty of Bollywood content on it, perhaps even some older stuff that I have identified as a good fit for this series. And a 14-hour plane ride is the perfect opportunity to watch a Bollywood movie, the longest one I can possibly find. 

If they don't have anything, that'll still leave me 11 days after I return to watch my August movie. In fact, I might have tried to catch my July movie in this way, as we're flying over on July 26th, except that a) if they didn't have anything, I'd have only five days left in the month to watch something, a pretty big ask with all my other travel commitments, and b) I'd rather have most of my choices in this series be intentional ones, not just whatever the plane ride has to offer.