Given that its basic foundation rests on time-loop, one can’t even accuse Bhool Chuk Maaf of being a rinse-repeat film. What we can definitely point a finger at is how the film — in an oxymoronic way — uses this trope both lazily and laboriously. As a result, what we end up getting is a two-hour watch with endless possibilities let down by limited execution.
Bhool Chuk Maaf unfolds in the kind of small-town India that Bollywood has been feeding us for years. Quirky families, oddball players, humour of the kind that has at least one lavatory-laced joke and, more often than not, a character talking and walking (talking more than walking) like Kareena Kapoor’s Geet from Jab We Met.
Here, that responsibility lies on the shoulders of leading lady Wamiqa Gabbi. Wamiqa, otherwise a proficient actor whose skills have been honed on the sets of filmmakers like Vishal Bhardwaj and Vikramaditya Motwane, is stuck playing a perky-quirky prototype. Her Titli exasperatingly oscillates between mollycoddling her boyfriend Ranjan (Rajkummar Rao) and berating him for being a loser. It is a rather thankless and vacuous part.
Rajkummar, on the other hand, is a perfect fit for a time-loop film, given that the actor — move over, Ayushmann Khurrana! — has been stuck playing a small-town Everyman in every second film over the last few years. Besides the Stree universe, it has been an assembly-line array of unremarkable small-town cinema — Mr & Mrs Mahi to Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video to more — and it is only because of the talented actor that he is that Raj is able to rise above a mediocre script and still leave a mark. The same happens in the case of Bhool Chuk Maaf.
Directed by debutant Karan Sharma, Bhool Chuk Maaf kicks off with Ranjan and Titli in the process of eloping to get married. That lands them at the police station and in the presence of both families, Ranjan grudgingly accepts Titli’s dad’s challenge to land a government job in two months, a prerequisite to marrying her. That is, however, easier said than done and though Ranjan manages to pull off a miracle — with the help of bhagwan (God) and Bhagwan (Sanjay Mishra) — the film soon finds him stuck in a time warp. Ranjan is unable to progress beyond the 29th day on the calendar, replaying the same events over and over again. That not only sets him off on a (largely non-comedic) spiral, but also allows the film to push in a social message or two, with a climax that feels severely disjointed from the rest of the film.
Bhool Chuk Maaf treads familiar territory in look and feel and casts the same faces — Raghubir Yadav, Sanjay Mishra, Seema Pahwa, Anubha Fatehpuria — that have increasingly grown to earning their bread and butter from this sub-genre. What it does have is a premise that could have automatically sifted it from the crowd. But the writing (also by Karan Sharma) is dull and listless. So much so that even the elements of time-loop play out inconsistently, with the director waking up every now and then to inject new incidents and people into its recurring cycle of events. This is only just one example of the filmmaking reeking of a basic lack of interest. The optics of having a Hindu leading man washing away his ‘sins’ by helping a Muslim man (whose name is repeated many times over to drive home the point) seems misplaced and manipulative.
On the plus side, Sudeep Chatterjee’s cinematic lensing of Benaras makes Bhool Chuk Maaf a delight to the eyes. But there is an assault on the ears waiting in the end credits in the form of Tanishk Bagchi’s brutalisation of Love Aaj Kal’s iconic Chor bazaari.
In the end, despite some flashes of what it could have been, Bhool Chuk Maaf doesn’t redeem itself from being unforgivably boring. The apology for which is present in the title itself.