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‘Bhool Chuk Maaf’ Movie Review: Rajkummar Rao, Wamiqa Gabbi's Time-loop Comedy Repeats The Same Mistakes
‘Bhool Chuk Maaf’ snatches moralistic defeat from the jaws of victory.
Director: Karan Sharma
Writer: Karan Sharma
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Wamiqa Gabbi, Seema Pahwa, Sanjay Mishra, Zakir Hussain, Raghubir Yadav, Ishtiyak Khan, Jay Thakkar
Language: Hindi
Imagine an enticing cricket match. The players have serious skills. The spectators are having a blast. The momentum swings back and forth. Until suddenly, out of nowhere, a batsman does something controversial: he gets out on purpose. He ‘sacrifices’ his own innings so that his teammate, the more deserving candidate, can smash the winning runs. The commentators then play down the incident and reveal that this whole match was planned down to the T — it was all a ruse to prove that cricket is a selfless sport. Nothing was real. In fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation donated a small fortune to NGOs for every wicket and boundary. It’s not enough that cricket entertains; it must make the world a better place. Fans must be taught the value of humanity, even if it’s at the cost of the game. Some might call this charity. I call it ethical match-fixing.
This is what watching a Bollywood social-message movie feels like today. As a viewer, it’s hard not to feel cheated. It often starts off as a fun small-town entertainer: nice cast, amusing premise, quirky setup, endless possibilities. Then comes the ‘reveal’: the self-important themes and monologues, which work actively against the story. Maddock Films does more than most to cushion the fall. The genre is inventive and high-concept enough — a horror comedy (Stree, Stree 2, Bhediya, Munjya) or a surrogate-mom drama (Mimi) — to be a vessel for the commentary. But its foray into scifi — first with Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Liya and now Bhool Chuk Maaf — turns the genre into a whole kitchen for the commentary. The message not only feels more forced, it almost never measures up to the playfulness of the premise. Bhool Chuk Maaf keeps us guessing about its purpose till well into its second hour. When it eventually comes, it’s so lazy and sanctimonious that the execution looks like an afterthought; the concept becomes a distant memory.
The film is set in Varanasi, a city steeped in religion and heritage, so even the sci-fi is actually spi-fi (spiritual-fiction). It revolves around (and round and round) Ranjan Tiwari (Rajkummar Rao), a lovable loser who must find a government job within two months in order to marry his girlfriend Titli Mishra (Wamiqa Gabbi). Their love language is resentment: Titli is either making cutesy baby-faces at him or humiliating/scolding/whipping him for being a no-good fool. In between, they slip in a few Brahmastra-coded song sequences. A desperate Ranjan enlists the help of a shady local fixer (Sanjay Mishra) named Bhagwan (“God”), gets the job, plans the wedding, but forgets a vow he made to Lord Shiva on his praying spree. So the chaste Hindu man finds himself trapped on the day of the Mehendi ceremony in an endless loop — so painfully close to marrying Titli — until he fulfills that promise. Palm Springs (2020) could never.
I enjoy time-loop stories as much as the next nerd that obsesses about destiny and karma, but I’m not sure the film fully gets the genre. The idea is to establish the original day well enough — the routines, incidents, rhythms — to riff on the link to subsequent versions. But beyond a pot breaking and a drunken terrace chat, the identity and chaos of this day are barely shown. It’s only when Ranjan struggles to accept his doomed reality that we see other patterns being added: a bachelor party with an item song, an ill-fitting sherwani, a cow-dung accident, a crisis spat with Titli at the ghat, a suicidal bridge-jumper. Also, the drunken terrace session — a sweet scene where the couple fears the inevitability of change — disappears from the loop. It somehow feels like the writing isn’t doing enough with the gimmick (or the supporting cast: Raghubir Yadav, Seema Pahwa, Zakir Hussain and others are criminally wasted). There’s also the irritating loophole of Ranjan taking forever to circle back to the pandit whose advice he had initially taken. We see him trying everything else — feeding animals, feeding superstition, carrying out every holy custom possible — except the most obvious one.
Despite these minor technicalities, Rao and his physical humour as Ranjan keep things interesting. One might fault him for doing variations of this role too often (there’s a time-loop pun in there), but he’s always effective. Being a natural, too, requires a fair bit of skill and flair. It’s an oeuvre otherwise populated by the likes of Ayushmann Khurrana and Vicky Kaushal, but Rao’s consistency puts him a notch higher. The film opens with an animated montage of the couple falling in love, and Rao’s body-acting later is the perfect extension of the animation. There’s a bit of old-school Govinda and comic-Akshay Kumar in the way he goes about these characters. His timing shines more opposite a performer like Gabbi, who plays Titli as more of an intellectually thick person than an emotionally expressive one. She tries too hard to make her a Geet-coded fantasy, but there’s a thin line between an unlikable partner and a woman who hates herself for caring too much.
What Rao’s acting does is give the film a chance to be clever. Before Ranjan realises the reason, several narrative prospects come to mind. For instance, once he is advised that he might have hurt someone on the day, he goes around being gratingly nice to everyone and randomly asking for forgiveness (as the title suggests) to undo the curse. At this point, I wondered if this was the film’s way of subverting the grouchy small-town-Ayushmann-Khurrana-style masculinity that the mid-2010 comedies thrived on. Ranjan is just as impatient and crude until then, so his sudden politeness becomes a genre in-joke. But this doesn’t last long. Then I wondered if perhaps Ranjan might finally come to his senses and fall out of love with Titli, whose recurring taunts and moods exhaust him during the loop. Maybe a reverse-love-story is the point: the man discovers they’re incompatible while hoping to escape a curse that prevents them from marrying each other. But no, even that doesn’t happen. Too edgy. What about a futility-of-rituals-and-blind-faith or commercialism-of-tradition or rising-unemployment angle? No, too political. One by one, the promises fade.
So the film, like others of its ilk, chooses the lowest-hanging fruit and the most performative route. It’s like bringing out the switch-hit to score a single off the last ball. The basic notion — that everyone prays for themselves and nobody else — is not bad, but a lot of it is lost in translation and unnecessary spectacle. I can’t really get into the conflict without spoiling the plot, so let’s just say it’s an idea that thinks it’s progressive, but it’s actually more of the same patronising humanity-is-the-biggest-religion spiel where one community is magnanimous enough to save the others and educate the oxygen around us. It’s still difficult to trust Hindi movies that insist on spelling out their virtues.
Even if the spi-fi were to self-combust like this, you’d hope for a less generic resolution than a side character schooling strangers when the script reaches a dead end. (Rao’s SRK fandom finds shape here in a Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa-inspired scene). Or worse, the protagonist breaking the fourth wall. At least the horror comedies took big swings in their climaxes; the genre didn’t succumb to the subtext. As a time-loop film, it’s tempting to notice the irony of literally going around in circles and arriving back at the same preachy disappointment. The same formula is repeated again and again and again. The same sighs are elicited with Groundhog Day-level grit. It’s all designed, of course. The boys played well for charity. And ethical match-fixing reaches a whole new level.