Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

 Many Bollywood movies will boldly jump from one genre to another, but Baar Baar Dekho (2016) doesn't do that.  Instead, it sort of meanders into the valley between genres and sits for a while.  Is it a romance with fantasy elements?  Is it a fantasy about a struggling relationship splintered through time?  Baar Baar Dekho doesn't want to worry about genre boundaries, it just wants to live in the moment.

Delhi, 2016.  Mathematical prodigy Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) and aspiring artist Diya (Katrina Kaif) are childhood sweethearts, and they have a musical montage to prove it.  The relationship isn't perfect, but it's going well enough that when Diya proposes, Jai feels he has no choice but to accept.  He's quietly freaking out, though, and when the priest (Raji Kapur) drops by to explain the rituals, Jai peppers him with questions about the logical and mathematical underpinnings.

Things get worse when Diya reveals a special wedding surprise, a house which she bought with the help of her wealthy father (Ram Kapoor).  Jai feels that he should have been consulted first (fair), and he's weighing a job offer from Cambridge and doesn't want to be tied down to a house in Delhi.  They fight, Diya storms off, and Jai drinks a bottle of champagne and passes out.

He wakes up in Thailand, with Diya, ten days later.  They're on their honeymoon, and while jai is baffled about what has happened, they still manage to have a lovely time.

The next morning it's two years later, in 2018, and Diya is in labor.  Jai tries to drive her to the hospital, but he doesn't know his way around Cambridge.  When they reach the hospital Jai looks for a doctor to examine his brain.  After the doctor tells him he's fine, he runs into the priest from his wedding, who tells him to look for tiny moments.  And then his mother (Sarika) arrives, and gets him to hold his newborn son Arjun.

The next morning Jai wakes up in his classroom, with bored students waiting for him to start the lecture.  It's 2034, and after the lecture, Arjun (Varun Raj), now a Goth teenager, arrives to drive him to the courthouse.  It's only when he arrives that Jai realizes that he's there to finalize his divorce from Diya.  Jai pleads with Diya for another chance, and when that doesn't work he goes home and pleads with whatever force is moving him through time.

And then he wakes up in 2023, at home with Diya and his children - Jai and Diya also have a daughter, much to Jai's surprise.  This is his second chance and, well, he tries.  He receives a job offer to teach at Harvard, but he's sidetracked by a call for help from his old friend Chitra (Sayani Gupta), who is worried about the potential collapse of her marriage, and winds up missing both Arjun's football game and Diya's first art exhibition.  Still, he manages to not have an affair with Chitra, and that should be enough to fix everything, right?

The next morning, it is 2047, and everything is not fixed.

Now, obviously Jai is going to learn a valuable lesson about living in the present and focusing on life's small moments as they happen, because otherwise why go on a time travel adventure at all?  However, while Jai and Diya clearly have relationship issues at the beginning of the movie, he's largely learning about his mistakes before he actually makes them!  It's as if Ebenezer Scrooge received the full three ghost visitation the night after his broken engagement with Belle.  It sidesteps years of potential regret and suffering, but still feels a bit like supernatural punishment for futurecrime.

As a romance, Baar Baar Dekho is very restrained.  Malhotra has a knack for playing gloomy young men who grow into love and happiness, but that does require a brighter partner for balance, and in most of the time periods Katrina Kaif is either sad or angry.  (Usually both.)  The right lessons are learned and the story reaches a satisfying conclusion, but you're not going to be swept along by the tide of romance.  It's probably better to focus on the small moments.