Director Sameer Vidwans’ Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri—mercifully shortened to TMMT—attempts to combine the modern hook-up culture with the old-school Bollywood romance. The result is a film that very loud in its…
Croatia’s glamour being the film’s setting, Rehan (Kartik Aaryan), a wedding planner from Los Angeles, and Rumi (Ananya Panday), a novelist of love stories from Agra are the movie’s main characters. Their chance meeting on a vacation turns too soon into a usual Hindi film cliché, where persistent striving becomes equated with love. What starts as Rumi’s disinclination, is soon turned into mutual liking, thus leading up to the wedding.
But the romance faces an expected obstacle. Rumi is not going to the US with her hubby and leaving her grieving father Amar (Jackie Shroff) behind. It is pure coincidence that Amar gets sick all of a sudden and this is the means to raise the emotional tension in the plot but it does not come across as a natural occurrence rather a trick of the storyteller.
The film scripted by Karan Shrikant Sharma, TMMT is a pile of concepts. The first section presents Croatia as a vacation destination while the other resembles an opulent wedding video and the remaining parts are making desperate attempts to evoke the magic of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. The references are so overt that they at times completely overpower the movie’s expression.
The dialogue is intended to be modern, borrowing Gen Z slang and making fun of the “wokeness” all the time. Instead of being fresh, most of it is forced and childish. Kartik Aaryan’s shouting of his lines only adds to the exhaustion rather than giving it a lively feel.
With a running time of 145 minutes, the movie moves slowly through scenes that are poorly written and only later does it gain some momentum when the main characters are involved in a love vs. parents debate. A slightly chaotic and comical drunken episode is amusing for some time, but it can’t help much in accelerating the film’s slow pace.
Kartik Aaryan appears to be an inappropriate selection for the part of a self-assured and unfaithful man who is meant to be attractive to all. He acts better in a role of a self-centered dominant male than playing a romantic lead very convincingly. Ananya Panday’s Rumi, on the other hand, is quite a flat character who goes back and forth between being an obedient daughter and an aspiring writer but does not make a strong impression in either role.
Eventually, Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri can’t really prove the hype around it. There is a big love story under the shiny pictures and retro mentions that doesn’t say much about contemporary relationships, and above all, it is very boring for the audience.
