Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya

An Experiment Gone Awry. Once the novelty of the notion wears off – and that happens pretty quickly – there is little on offer here barring the fact that this is the first time that Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon have teamed up. A science fiction love story undone by a faulty battery, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya is hopelessly half-baked fare. Nary a word that the Shahid Kapoor-Kriti Sanon starrer intones is in the realms of meaningful conversation, let alone comprehension. If it is ever funny, it is only unintentionally so. Written and directed by Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah for Dinesh Vijan of Maddock Films and Jio Studios, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya is a rom-com that masquerades as a family drama and manages to be neither.

The film has shades of Maria Schrader’s I Am Your Man, a German sci-fi drama released in 2021. The film’s female protagonist, an archaeologist looking for funds for a research project, agrees to spend three weeks with a humanoid robot programmed to be a perfect partner attuned to her every single need, feeling and impulse. This is not to suggest that Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya is a rip-off of I Am Your Man. It cannot be. The German film was a serious-minded, philosophy-tinged romance. The film under review is a fluffy, flaky affair that takes next to no time to come unstuck.

Once the novelty of the notion wears off – and that happens pretty quickly – there is little on offer here barring the fact that this is the first time that Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon have teamed up. More than anything else, it is a misogynist’s unbridled fantasy. It reduces the ‘perfect woman’ to a super-robot designed to dance to the tune of its maker or owner, an obedient machine coded to take orders and be switched on or off at the flick of a button. That is anything but funny.

What Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya wants to drive at becomes amply clear when the single hero tells his married male friend that the robotic woman who has strayed into his life is better than a nagging wife. Neither of the two bats an eyelid when that line is delivered because they believe that a woman has got to be engineered to fall in line. If that is any consolation, the two men may be full of themselves but they aren’t outright toxic. The film that these characters populate is a casually, unabashedly sexist comedy of manners, a slapdash cross between an obnoxious Kabir Singh and an incoherent Pyaar Ka Punchnama.

The male protagonist of the film, Delhi lad Aryan Agnihotri (Shahid Kapoor), is a robotics engineer who, on a trip to the US, falls for Sifra (Kriti Sanon). He has no clue who the girl is until much damage has been done. Sifra is the most ambitious creation of the hero’s maternal aunt Urmila Shukla (Dimple Kapadia), owner of a thriving robotics firm in the US of A. The latter insists that the robot is meant to be a companion for lonely hearts but does not tell us why the ‘humanoid’ must be a woman at the beck and call of her master. Aryan is lonely by choice. He not only turns down girl after girl chosen for him by his family, he also spurns the advances of a female colleague on the grounds of lack of compatibility. But a day out with Sifra, super-efficient caretaker of his workaholic mausi’s home, forces the standoffish man to let his guard down. Life is not the same again for Aryan.

Genre:Drama
Director: Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah
Cast:Shahid Kapoor, Kriti Sanon, Dharmendra, Dimple Kapadia