Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri. Any film with a title that aims for the tongue twister hall of fame — and failing spectacularly even on that front — is anyway trying too hard. The rest of it is no different.
TMMTMTTM (took me multiple back space taps to get that right) tries too hard to be a breezy comedy. It tries too hard to be an intense romance. It tries too hard to have a cool cat of a leading man. It tries too hard to have a heroine in touch with her emotions. It tries too hard to conjure chemistry. It tries too hard to build conflict. It tries too hard to be an “it’s all about loving your parents” emo-drama (their words, not ours). And it tries way too hard be a “2025 ke hookup culture mein ’90s ki love story”.
What Tu Meri Main Tera... doesn’t need to make too much of an effort to be is a picture-perfect Instagram reel, an unrelenting tourism board ad and a borderline annoying brand showcase. This is the kind of film where “true love” happens in 10 days, father-figure relationships are forged in 48 hours and where everyone is game to indulge in more than a willing suspension of disbelief as the action shifts from love story to family drama, family drama to love story in rinse-repeat mode.
While we are all for films that allow us to leave our worries behind and simply have a good time in theatres, just pretty people in pretty locales operating with surface-level emotions do not an engaging watch make. Tu Meri Main Tera... is that kind of film. One which wants to coat its glossy exterior with well-meaning thought and emotion, but whose execution — writing to acting — comes up so woefully short that all you are left with is the thought that you could have spent 144 minutes of Christmas Day much better. Even staring at the ceiling at home would have been more stimulating.
First, for a film that wants to call itself a “true romance”, there is little or no chemistry between its leading pair. Kartik Aaryan and Ananya Panday — who had a much better equation on screen in Pati Patni Aur Woh — simply go through the motions in this Sameer Vidwans-directed film. The lack of synergy between the two is palpable. While Kartik is too much out there in the most Kartik Aaryan way possible, Ananya consistently gives off the vibe that she would rather be anywhere else than in this film.
That their characters are superficially sketched — which is par for the course in most Bollywood films of today in this genre — makes the film a non-starter from the get go. She is an author from Agra (with a book called “Love in Agra”) who jets off to Croatia on a solo trip. He is a high-flying, smooth-talking so-called alpha male settled in the US but ever ready to flaunt his shuddh desi heart. He, of course, is also on the way to Croatia. They start off on sparring mode — she calls out his “male ego”, he addresses her as a “faltu feminist” and imposes himself on her in the creepy way that Hindi film heroes do. As they journey from one picturesque tourist destination to another — many of which are labelled like a travel documentary (“lathering Lakme in Lavender Village” is our contribution) — they hook up, share their (no-sob) back stories and eventually fall in love. Shaadi is on the cards, but her deshbhakt dad (Jackie Shroff somewhat redeems a rather pathetically written character) will not leave his roots. She sacrifices her love, but our Raj Malhotra-lite will have none of it. In true DDLJ style, he follows his “Simran” to Agra, tries to win over the family, shows how much of a Mama’s boy he is (Neena Gupta, playing Kartik’s forward-thinking mom is a bright spot), even as another wedding plays out in the backdrop. Love, laughter, tears, fights are all stirred together in a chaotic cauldron till the film hurtles towards its rather tired ending.
Somewhere beneath all the messy melodrama, however, were several ideas worth exploring — that of filial ties, overturning tradition and how love alone is never enough. Vidwans is the same man who gave us Satyaprem Ki Katha, also starring Kartik, a few years ago. While working within the tried-and-tested tenets of commercial Bolly cinema, that film sensitively dwelt on prickly subjects like the importance of consent and the traumatic aftermath of date rape. But Tu Meri Main Tera... goes here, there, everywhere... and eventually nowhere.
I liked/ didn’t like Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri because...
Tell t2@abp.in
