Maybe around 10 or 15 years ago, when there was that boom for these NRI movies, which were basically different versions of DDLJ or KKHH, where people would be okay spending their time and money to see foreign locations on the big screen, a movie like Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri would have felt like a passable fun film. Sameer Vidwans’ new movie has the heroine saying, “I am looking for a ’90s love story in today’s hook-up culture.” And to achieve that, they basically mixed Tamasha and DDLJ with a dash of Kal Ho Na Ho humor.
Rehaan Mehra and his mother, Pinky Mehra, own this wedding planning company that is among the top 10 companies in the world. So this sharp and witty guy meets Rumi Wardhan Singh, a struggling writer, on his way to Croatia. Coincidentally, they both ended up in the same place, on the same yacht, and in the same cabin (it’s all there in the trailer). The evolution of the obvious romance between these two seemingly opposite people is what we see in Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri.
When you sort of analyze the movie’s writing structure, you can see that they are assembling elements that seem to be working for the audience. It is like a reverse-engineered screenplay after they got the approval for locations. At the beginning of the movie, we see that this project is done in association with a Croatian initiative to promote film shooting in Croatia. The idea here is basically the classic one of “Babuji Nahi Manenge.” However, to make Babuji a 2025 father, Sameer Vidwans and his writer, Karan Shrikant Sharma, portray him as a cool retired colonel who won’t restrict his daughters. In the beginning parts of the story, where Rumi talks about various stages in a relationship, she mentions parents’ objection as the Big C, aka conflict. Well, when it came to the movie, that C wasn’t that big.
As I said, it is like a wannabe mixture of Tamasha and DDLJ. So in the first half, we have the hero and heroine going the Matarghashti way in Croatia instead of Corsica, and in the second half, we have the hero trying to present himself as an eligible candidate in front of the heroine’s father, against the backdrop of an Agra where the Taj Mahal is still visible. So Anil Mehta gets to capture the most picturesque locations for every single shot of the movie. We have those dance numbers on foreign outdoor locations, and there is a wedding dance with almost all the stars in the film shot inside a studio in the most Dharma way. I mean, it has all the elements in the ingredients list. However, what it lacks is a fresh concept that won’t make you feel that you are watching yet another derivative film.
Kartik Aaryan is somewhat repeating his signature style of saying these quirky lines at a breathless pace. However, since most elements in the movie did not give us any joy or surprise, his flow in saying some of these altered rhyming dialogues was fun to watch. I still feel whenever he tries to pull off swagger through slow-motion shots of his entry, there is that forced feel. Ananya Pandey is trying to play this middle-class girl who blabbers very little. Looking at her filmography, filled mostly with Fifty Shades of Poo, that feels like a new challenge, and she did an okay job in restricting that inner Poo. Jackie Shroff as the Amrish Puri for Gen Z was fine in that calmer demeanor. Neena Gupta is somewhat playing the female version of Anupam Kher from DDLJ.
Towards the end of the movie, Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri, which was vouching for the thought that kids should make some sacrifices for their parents, tries to act progressive by reimagining certain conventions. However, the emotional depth of situations and even characters was so low that when the hero takes this “tough call,” you would end up feeling like asking him, you couldn’t have thought about it in the first place? I think people who complain about Bollywood should stop saying that they miss the old Bollywood. Because people who are calling the shots are misinterpreting it as recreating the formula that worked in the ’90s.
