And Anushka Sharma as the tree.

A good ghost movie is never just about the ghost; the restless spirits of the dead are a perfect vehicle for the delivery of metaphor.  This is true whether the movie is a horror story or a frothy romance.  A movie like Phillauri (2017) might bend the rule, but in the end, metaphor is inevitable.

Kanan (Suraj Sharma) is an aspiring rapper, flying home from Canada to marry his childhood sweetheart, Anu (Mehreen Pirzada.)  he's also quietly freaking out; he loves Anu, but isn't sure he's ready to get married, wants to see if he can succeed in his rap career, and wants to find himself.  He's not comfortable talking about with Anu, though, so instead he stews and acts aloof and weird.

 

Things are about to get weirder.  According to his horoscope, Kanan is a Manglik, born under the malign influence of Mars, and his marriage is fated to end in disaster.  The accepted remedy is to accelerate the disaster by marrying the unfortunate Maglik to an animal, an object, or, as in Kanan's case, a tree.  Kanan marries the tree, the tree is chopped down, and the problem is solved.  

 

The trouble is, this particular tree is haunted by the ghost of Shashi (Anuska Sharma.)  Shashi is now technically married, and her tree is gone, so she doesn't really have anything else to do but haunt Kanan, and by haunt I mostly mean "Provide a sarcastic running commentary on the wedding preparations." Still, it's enough to freak Kanan out, and he starts acting even more aloof and weird, further alienating Anu.

 

And Shashi has her own story, involving her old fashioned and strict brother (Manav Vij), as well as Roop Lal Phillauri (Diljit Dosanjh), a charming rogue who makes his living singing bawdy songs for the local villagers, but also has a reputation for publishing amazing poetry in the weekly newspaper.  Shahsi isn't impressed with his singing, and she slaps him when he tries to woo her with one of the poems, because she knows he didn't write them.  She did.

Roop Lal immediately decides to reform, and does a pretty good job of it.  It's enough to win over Shahsi, but not nearly enough to win over her brother.  And since Shashi is a ghost in the present, it's clear that this story is not going to have a happy ending.

 

Phillauri is probably at its best during the scenes set in the present day, with the hapless Kanan and Anu confronted by their own anxieties and Shashi as the looming specter of relationship anxiety.  It's an engaging mix of genuine relationship drama and fish (or rather ghost) out of water comedy.  Anushka Sharma is good at being funny, and these scenes give her the chance to be funny.

 

The flashback scenes aren't bad, by any means, but they move at a much slower pace than the rest of the movie, and so they seem to drag a bit by comparison.  One thing the scenes do very well, though is the poetry.  It can be hard to convey artistic talent onscreen, but Shashi's poetry is genuinely good.

Phillauri is also genuinely good, but it's at its best when it gives its ghost a little bit of distance.

The plot does get a little fuzzy at times.

It's easy to grow jaded about movies; sometimes it seems like if you've seen one buddy picture about a reclusive genius teaming up with an animated teddy bear to battle a human trafficking ring, you've seen them all.  Teddy (2021) doesn't really stray from the genius/teddy bear formula, and it hits all the notes you'd expect from the genre, but there's something to be said for taking a tried and true formula and executing it well.

 

Srividya (Sayyesha) is a young and carefree college student with a talent for photography and a boyfriend that she's not ready to tell her parents about yet.  During a bus trip with her classmates, Sri tries to help an accident victim.  She's injured, and is promptly rushed to the hospital, where she's placed in a room with a wisecracking kid and his enormous teddy bear, but the sinister hospital staff promptly drug her and take her away.  As Sri's body slips into a medically induced coma, her spirit slips into the form of the teddy bear.  She apologizes to the kid (who is, after all, now out one giant teddy bear) and escapes from the hospital.

 

Shiva (Arya), on the other hand, is a brilliant loner with an eidetic memory.  His memory is so powerful that he's able to completely master a new skill every few months.  he's already earned several advanced degrees, but instead of working he plays the stock market in an incredibly precise fashion, always earning just enough money to live comfortably.  That takes him about fifteen minutes a day, leaving him plenty of time for learning and avoiding human contact.  Shiva has a mother (Praveena) and one friend (Satish) and that is enough for him.

 

However, while Shiva's a recluse, he's not heartless.  When he sees a gang of thugs threatening a woman on a train, he steps in.  The thugs assume he's easy prey, but Shiva hasn't just mastered mental skills, he's picked up phenomenal skill in hand to hand combat as well.  Basically, he has all the skills of Batman without the motivation, but he's more than happy to put a stop to injustice when it's happening right in front of him.

 

Also on the train?  Sri.  She realizes that Shiva is someone who could help her get her body back, so she follows him home.  Once she manages to convince Shiva that he's not crazy and she needs his help they . . . spend some time getting to know each other,  But after that montage is over, the new best pals get down to some serious Batmanning.

 

Now, we don't really live in a word where movies about crime fighting teddy bears and their brilliant hunky sidekicks are a dime a dozen.  It's a ridiculous premise.  Teddy makes it work by taking it completely seriously.  This is not a comedy.  Funny things happen sometimes, but that's because the movie pairs a chirpy extrovert with a gloomy recluse, and also they are fighting crime and one of them is trapped in the body of a toy.  The premise is silly enough, so the movie doesn't milk it, it just commits completely.  It's just a focused, fun action movie with a nasty villain, cleanly choreographed and brutal fight scenes, and engaging leads.  And a talking teddy bear.

Singlle and ready to minglle.

Jane Austen is known for her use of what is sometimes called 'Free Indirect Discourse,' a literary technique in which a character speaks through the voice of the narrator.  It's a melding of first and third person point of view, omniscient but intimate and fallible.  And it's blooming hard to pull off in a movie, but somehow Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017) manages something similar.

Jaya Shashidharan (Parvathy Thiruvothu) is fine.  Her younger brother Ashish (Siddharth Menon) is studying at Princeton, and her husband Manav passed away years ago, but she's fine.  Her work at an insurance agency keeps her busy, and she's frequently babysitting and cat-sitting for various friends.  She's fine.  Just ask her.

 

And then Jaya decides that she's sick of being fine, so she creates an account on a dating website, and is immediately flooded by crude and aggressive messages, along with a very polite and erudite note form someone calling himself Yogi.  

Yogi turns out to be Yogendra Kumar Devendra Nath Prajapati (Irrfan Khan), a self-proclaimed and self published poet who makes his money (apparently a lot of money) by suggesting food items to various companies.  Yogi is rich enough to be called eccentric, but really he's weird, a bit full of himself, and very, very talkative, and while Jaya isn't exactly charmed, she's sufficiently entertained to agree to another date. 

 

Yogi talks about . . . well, Yogi talks about everything that pops into his head, but he spends a fair amount of time talking about his three former girlfriends, all of whom (he says) still yearn for him.  Jaya suggest that he go see them and find out if they're pining or not, and Yogi invites her to come along.  Jaya surprises herself by agreeing.

 

The romantic road trip is a Bollywood staple; boy meets girl, boy and girl grow closer while taking a life-changing journey across India or Switzerland or . . . well, let's be honest, it's usually India or Switzerland.  Of course, the road trip is usually the first part of the movie, with our heroes overcoming the various obstacles to their love in the second part.  Yogi and Jaya are older, and the only real obstacle to their potential love is that they're both set in their ways and too focused on their respective pasts to move on.

 

But what really interests me about Qarib Qarib Singlle is the narrative voice.  At first the movie is locked to Jaya's perspective, and she will occasionally talk directly to the camera to comment on the action.  As she gets to know Yogi better, that loosens up, and we see more and more from his perspective as well.  (Though only Jaya gets to address the camera.)  The end result is a narrative that is intimate but fallible.  The movie seems to change its mind as Jaya does.  The story being told is not very Austen (though Yogi is proud, and Jaya is quick to judge) but the storytelling definitely is.

 

Turns out a serpent's tooth is also pretty sharp.

Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, Mansoor Khan's story of star-crossed young lovers, was a huge success, launching Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla into stardom.  Naturally, Bollywood producers set about trying to recreate the magic, and Khan and Chawla were cast in a number of films about young lovers with varying degrees of star-crossedness.  Results were . . . mixed.  Tum Mere Ho (1990), for instance, is notoriously bad.  On the other hand, it's a schmaltzy melodrama with Juhi Chawla, an angry naga, and black magicand I like all those things, so if anybody's going to like the movie, it'll be me.  Let's dig in.

When wealthy Thakur Choudhary (Sudhir Pandey) catches sight of a Naagmani (a magical gem set in a cobra's head) he is consumed by a Tolkeinian desire to possess it, so he kills the snake.  Unfortunately, the snake's mother (Kalpana Iyer) is nearby.  Choudhary pleads for mercy, telling her he was blinded by greed when he casually murdered her son, but for some reason she is not impressed.  She vows revenge, and later bites Choudhary's four year old son, apparently killing the boy.  The parents sadly set the body adrift on the river, while the angry snake watches.

I say that the boy was "apparently killed, because he's pulled from the river by Baba (possibly Ishrat Ali, but the IMDB entry isn't really clear), a kindly snake charmer and black magician.  Baba draws the poison out of the boy's body using his magical powers, then decides to raise him as his on son and apprentice, because, hey, free son!  he names the boy Shiva, and by the time Shiva has grown up to be played by Aamir Khan, he has mastered both his adopted father's crafts.

 

While performing at a village fair, Shiva catches a glimpse of Paro (Juhi Chawla), daughter of the wealthy and powerful Choudhry Charanjit Singh (Ajit Vachani).  Shiva is immediately smitten, and surprisingly, so is Paro!  When they meet later, she asks him to sjhow her his snake-charming technique, and soon they're wandering the hills together, singing about love and occasionally getting caught in the rain.

 

It can't last.  When Paro's father finds out, he hires another black magician (Anirudh Agarwal) to deal with the upstart.  Shiva easily wins the magical duel, so Singh decides on a more direct approacjh; he gathers a band of ruffians and has them beat up Shiva, but before he can shoot the boy, Baba arrives and pleads for his son's life, promising that he won't come around Paro anymore.

 

When Paro finds out about the beating and attempted murder, she's furious and confronts her father, but her mother takes her aside and explains just how starcrossed she actually is.  It's not just that Shiva is a poor traveler and therefore not husband material; Paro's marriage has already been arranged.  In fact, she's already married, and has been since they were small children.  In fact, she's already a widow, since her husband was bitten by a snake and died soon after the wedding.  (And at this point you've probably already figured out how the story will end.) In fact, in a few days Paro will go to her in-laws home to live out the rest of her days in miserable solitude as a widow, because there's no possible way she could ever remarry.  Paro agrees that this is completely logical, and meets Shiva one last time.  She pretends that she never loved him, he lashes out angrily, and stalks off, apparently never to return.  Paro makes the sad journey to her in-laws' home, content that at least Shiva will be safe.

 

Of course, Shiva discovers that she lied and really does love him almost immediately, so he convinces Baba to move the entire band north, ostensibly in search of better snakes, but mostly so that he can stalk Paro.  He hangs around outside her house, playing snake charming music, hoping to draw her out.  It works.  Shiva suggests that maybe Paro shouldn't have to spend her whole life alone and miserable because of a marriage that she didn't consent to and wasn't even told about for years.  Paro is torn. She really does love Shiva, but nothing has really changed, and they still can't be together without leaving everything behind.

And then there's the angry snake lady.  When she discovers that the boy she bit all those years ago is still alive, she tries to finish the job, but Shiva is a powerful magician, so she can't get to him.  Paro, however, is not so well protected . . .

First things first. This movie is a product of the late eighties/early nineties Bollywood film industry, which means that the treatment of women is pretty bad.  Paro in particular is seemingly born to suffer, and she's betrayed and abused at various points in the film by pretty much everybody she loves, and that does include Shiva.  In the end everyone is forgiven because this is late eighties/early nineties Bollywood and the family unit must be preserved at all costs, but that doesn't make it okay.

On the other hand, Paro has a surprising amount of agency for a heroine of the period.  Shiva doesn't rescue her from her dismal life as a widow, he convinces her to rescue herself, and it's not a decision that comes quickly or easily.  Paro makes a choice, and it is definitely her choice.

Juhi does a fine job as the long-suffering Paro.  Snake movies are essentially a subgenre of supernatural melodrama, and they demand a kind of heightened reality in the performances.  Naturalistic acting wouldn't work at all.  Juhi commits, and so does Aamir; they are acting well for the genre of movie that they appear in.

So, does Tum Mere Ho deserve its bad reputation?  Maybe?  I'm pretty sure it's not a good movie.  It's dated, it's often silly, and it's certainly problematic, but I also found it compelling.  It really needs more snakes and a lot less suffering, though.