There are bad movies, and then there are movies that make you cringe so hard that you can’t bear to look at the screen. So I grimaced and looked away during Milap Zaveri’s Tera Yaar Hoon Main, the way a squeamish viewer does when confronted with graphic violence and gore. But looking away from the screen meant that I had to make peace with the young couple making out in the row ahead. So I turned my face to the other side, but there was another couple enjoying the privacy of the matinee show. Lest they found my frantic head-turning creepy, I concluded that the safest thing was to look at the screen again. But for how long? The film continued to make direct eye contact with me. This became a circular loop of embarrassment and coyness for 145 minutes, and now I’m so dizzy that I should be seeing stars but I’m not (because 0 stars out of 5).
Tera Yaar Hoon Main (“I Am Your Buddy”) opens with credits playing across heart-shaped balloons in pink clouds and pinker water. I can’t even pretend like I wasn’t warned. The first fifteen minutes unfold like a campy parody of Bollywood movies — the kind of spoofy scenes you’d find in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om — except this is serious. It’s the actual level of film-making: like the home-video project of a child that accidentally plays in theatres. The craft is beyond criticism. The muscular hero, Sanju (Aman Indra Kumar), leaps out of bed to save a friend from suicide on the railway tracks. The CGI train zooms by in shame, but it still looks more convincing than Sanju’s body language. The Nagpur-based Sanju is soon duly informed by his mother that he is being sent to Mumbai for a better future. She asks her bestie there, Vishwanath (Paresh Rawal), to look after Sanju and treat him as his friend.
This is the film’s central gimmick, by the way. 20-something Sanju and 60-something ‘Vishu’ address each other as “tu” and “dost” after this: cross-generational pals like Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell in Crazy Stupid Love. Naturally Sanju falls for Anu (Akanksha Sharma), the college-going daughter of Vishu. Never mind that Vishu and family live in a fancy bungalow, but he is presented as a middle-class scooter-driving government employee who is in debt because he’s too generous. Once Sanju is in love, however, the two buddies make a pact. Forget age-gap romances, this is an age-gap bromance. The interval block features old Vishu promising Sanju that he will be a friend who helps him win over the girl he loves, not a dad who believes that his daughter deserves better. He essentially agrees to be Sanju’s wingman. The two identities are detachable, you see. He gives Sanju 30 days to make her fall for him.
The second half features Sanju and Vishu swaying between their identities as playful friends (at one point Sanju asks Vishu’s help to elope with Anu) and father-versus-lover rivals. I believe this ‘duality’ reflects the film’s unwitting metaphor and message: watch it as a mass audience, not as a grumpy critic. Meanwhile, Anu and Sanju have the chemistry of misfiring siblings. One of their early I-hate-you moments shows him pinching her cleavage because there’s an ant crawling across it. I suspect this inane story is a sanitised version of something darker: two middle-aged uncles are friends until one falls for the daughter of the other. Is it twisted that they would still help each other? Probably. Would it have been a better bad movie? Probably too.
Zaveri’s dialogue-writing reaches peak detailing: leechad, you threw me in keechad? Sanju has a random situationship with a girl named Sajni early on so that someone can say: “Sajni’s dad turned out to be a Ghajini!”. But the most iconic line is reserved for a scene in which the boy is on a date with the girl. When he gets irritated with her for mentioning her dad (and his pal) too much, she responds in all seriousness: “Before marriage, every girl’s boyfriend is her father”. The trailer has the next line: “Those who save us from problems are called boyfriends, but those who don’t even let the problems happen are called fathers”. Towards the end, I half-expected her to start addressing Sanju as “daddy” to reinforce the film’s grand philosophy. I could swear I heard a daddy or two, but I can’t tell if it came from the screen or the couples in the hall that made me look away. I’m still rotating my head in circles. Thanks a lot, Tera Yaar Hoon Main.