‘Bobby Aur Rishi Ki Love Story’ Movie Review: The Death of the Hindi Romcom
Director Kunal Kohli returns with a Hum Tum-shaped debacle.
Director: Kunal Kohli
Writer: Kunal Kohli
Cast: Vardhaan Puri, Kaveri Kapur
Streaming on: Disney+ Hotstar
Language: Hindi
I’m running out of polite ways to say that most Bollywood launch vehicles are vanity vans parading as commercial movies. I’m running out of impolite ways to say that most Hindi rom-coms feature nepotism hires and Gen Z characters who speak like outdated youngsters at a debutante ball imagined by out-of-touch boomers. I’m also running out of ways to say that I’m running out of ways. Kunal Kohli’s Bobby Aur Rishi Ki Love Story looks like it was written in 1995, shot in 2005, scored in 2015, edited in 1985, colour corrected in 1975 and released in 2025.
Remember the annoying animated couple from Kohli’s hit, Hum Tum (2005)? Those two were still more realistic and less cringey than the live-action couple in this film, who do the walking-and-talking-in-Europe (or post-Brexit Britain) jig as if Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Before Sunrise were in-flight tourist videos rather than classic landscape changers. They start as enemies, become frenemies and turn into screechy soulmates — all with the artistic spirit of a paid vacation and the emotional awareness of an oblivious meme.
The film stars Vardhaan Puri (grandson of the late Amrish Puri) as MBA graduate Rishi and Kaveri Kapur (daughter of film-maker Shekhar Kapur and actress Suchitra Krishnamoorthi) as professional winemaker Bobby. Needless to mention, their vocations are Google-era hashtags; people like Rishi and Bobby don’t actually work, they just vibe. Money is a social construct. Naturally, we learn that their names stem from a parent’s fondness for Raj Kapoor movies; the same parent in the end asks Rishi if he is gay when he declares that his partner’s name is Bobby. Naturally, their paths cross so much that the movie is forced to start with a random thought fart about serendipity.
The story then opens with the frightfully young and bickering couple in the plush office of a therapist (who later says “you can order anything on the app Deliveroo if you’re hungry”) who asks how they met. Their montage-response suggests they almost met a bunch of times — a low-budget version of Raj and Simran unwittingly crossing each other on the streets of London — but this begs the question: how did they know? It’s the film’s job to know and punctuate these moments; the characters can’t logically be aware. The rest of the story unfolds as the sort of flashback that could’ve been an online greeting card. Between a soundtrack that tries too hard and a script that doesn’t even try, we see deep things like Bobby’s mom smoking at a wedding and telling her that family dysfunctionality and broken homes are not a genetic disease (“it’s BS!”), or Bobby reading Hemingway on a boat whose rower looks like a white tourist roped in as a reluctant extra. We know she’s heartbroken when she bins a mint chocolate-chip ice cream cone. Bobby doesn’t cry; Bobbys don’t cry.
We are also blessed with the cartoon-level flamboyance of Rishi, who thinks he’s an irritating playboy in a Beatles shirt but comes across more like an influencer with no moral boundaries. When he checks her cell-phone because it has no password, it’s supposed to be cute. When he checks her out lecherously, the voice in his head acts harder than him. “This vintage train from London to Cambridge is awesome!” mutters Rishi, during one of his several attempts at flirting and exposition in a film that’s aesthetically challenged at best and narratively broken at worst. If the dialogue wasn’t so surreal, one might almost forgive Bobby for not so playfully mocking him (“she left you for this guy?”) when he confesses that his ex-girlfriend slept with his best friend. He thinks nothing of getting engaged to a best friend named Anjali so that Anjali can deliver a half-clever line — she slaps him and says “this is what every Anjali should have done to every Rahul” — when she discovers that she’s the martyr-like third wheel of a love triangle. His name is Rishi, my name is Rahul, but never mind. Let’s not digress yet.
The leads look uncomfortable while dancing, emoting, chatting and singing in different parts of England. You can tell that they’re conscious of the attention that foreign shooting units invite; at times, even the camera feels like a bemused onlooker. In the parallel universe of a cultural satire, the British public’s second-hand awkwardness of watching them serves as sweet revenge for a history of colonisation. What better venue to conquer than Cambridge, the center of radical thinking, intellectual growth and education? Director Kunal Kohli was once famous for lilting musical tropes, SRK odes and NRI meet-cutes in his heyday. In my opinion, though, Kohli’s never really made a good film. Even his good films — like Hum Tum, Fanaa and Mujhse Dosti Karoge — were bad films masquerading as modern ones.
Some of his YRF contemporaries, like Siddharth Anand, have reinvented themselves by switching genres, but Kohli remains stubbornly committed to the dying hipster rom-com. Bobby mentions sex often to prove that the formula is more progressive now, but nothing can explain the Break Ke Baad-sized lapse in the fundamentals of film-making. Ideological progression is not the same as technical evolution. Not a single scene is competently staged, acted or conceived. There is no feel for craft or even the artifice of on-screen romance. The closest the film comes to meaning something is when the viewer realises that the title is a Hinglish remix of the enjoyable Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023). Its phonetic staleness rivals its storytelling staleness. It quickly runs out of ways — or walks out of ways — to resemble a film; it settles for the label of digital content for the sake of digital content. If the sequel is set in Oxford, the English dictionary might be in danger. Then I can’t write complicated lines like “its phonetic staleness rivals its storytelling staleness” or “ideological progression is not the same as technical evolution”.