It’s tempting to blindly like any Hindi film that dares to not be a violent actioner, a superstar-driven mass entertainer, a propaganda historical, a political thriller, a biopic or a mythological drama. Romcoms are suddenly as rare and desirable as spines; love stories — even the bad ones — are novel again. But romcoms like Pehla Pyaar Doosri Baar remind you why they went extinct. The newcomers-who-are-not-ready-but-star-in-a-designer-North-Indian-comedy template is a throwback to the early 2010s, when Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama set the ball rolling and triggered a wave of genre fatigue. Ranjan co-writes and produces here, which partly explains why the movie behaves like an ex who refuses to move on.
There is alleged evolution: the three flatmate-buddies in Gurgaon are two men and one woman now (take that, meninists), and the movie is shot like an extended music video with a bit of story thrown in. There are points when it bears an uncanny resemblance to the corny Bollywood film within the film that Suri and Tani go to watch in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. PPDB (“First Love, Second Time”) begins with the three corporate-slave protagonists — Vedant (Kunal Aryan Vaid), Gautam (Sparsh Walia) and Shivie (Sargun Luthra) — who decide to attend their high-school reunion and woo their first loves (also called juvenile crushes) because they see a broken one-sided lover (a Rajkummar Rao cameo) at a wedding. The reunion happens at a Dehradun campus that looks like a giant Lokhandwala coffee shop. Vedant sets his sights on former first-bencher Simran (Sakshi Vaidya); Gautam woos the former mean-girl Gehna (Alisha Chopra); and Shivie goes all weak-kneed for bearded playboy Karan (Thushar Chhibber). The setting is every man’s fantasy of aura-farming and nostalgic weekends where they show up and impress former bullies and baddies with their credentials.
Vedant and Simran become the primary track: the serious no-means-yes love story that aspires to be the Shah Rukh Khan and Ranbir Kapoor starrers of yore. She is engaged, they flirt, but he aims to charm her with lines like “a relationship without pyaar is like a contractual freelance job; a relationship with pyaar is a government job where you grow old and become each other’s pensions”. Freelancers have it hard enough in this economy, so ouch. Gautam’s track with Gehna acts as the comic-relief (shadowing the Kartik Aaryan arc in Pyaar Ka Punchnama); the boy gets more than he bargained for when Gehna turns out to be a clingy and manipulative sociopath. This may or may not involve a sex video and ‘funny’ emotional blackmail. Three male writers, if you’re wondering. Finally, Shivie’s track is given the stepchild treatment. Her strategy, as the only woman here, is simple: she transforms from a loose t-shirt-wearing foul-mouthed tomboy to a dancing siren to win over her hunk. That’s all she keeps doing. Rinse, makeover, repeat.
The film goes to great lengths to keep everyone decked up and pretty so that the performances are camouflaged. Most of the first half is the reunion (‘96 is not pleased); most of the second half gatecrashes a wealthy wedding weekend (nobody is pleased). The target audience is clear: the female characters are crazy or confused, and the men are sad or funny. Even the worst man of the lot is allowed to redeem himself. It’s 2026, and this shtick is meant to tickle the hearts of several Indian romeos who send laugh-emojis on sexist marriage jokes and instinctively turn to their partners during Obsession-coded moments. Even if you take out this dimension, there is a huge gap between what the film thinks it looks like and what it really is. The vanity in the mirror is a coping mechanism for a recycled lack of substance. When in doubt, a character slips in a “ch*tiya” or two to bring out the giggles; when in more doubt, the movie calls itself out for romanticising filmy-tragic tropes. It’s all so dated that a homophobic gag is used to break the tension at some point. If they dig deep enough, archeologists might unearth the fossilised remains of buried Hindi comedies from the 1990s that were at least a product of their time.
Of the cast, only Sparsh Walia gets passing marks as Gautam, who obviously is the ‘crowd-pleasing’ character for having an unhinged girlfriend who loves him too much. The rest try. The rest fail. A few heartbreak ballads are hummable because the film seems to be built around them. Towards the end, one of the friends remarks that they will not facilitate an eloping plan if the bride has not ‘consented’ to it; he proudly tells his buddy that this word is only applicable for women, not men. They repeat consent a couple of times like it’s a new language, even mansplaining its importance to Shivie. This reveals the movie as that snarky boy who taunts the world for growing up and embracing wokeness. Having said that, the “Baar” in the title sounds a lot like the place you’ll find me at after finishing this review at 11 in the morning.