A lot of Singhs, but very little Disco.

Critics hated Disco Singh (2014) , but it was a huge hit with audiences, breaking box office records for a Punjabi movie.  and it' easy to see why.  It's not a deep movie, it's certainly not a subtle movie, but it tries very hard to be an entertaining movie.

Don Bhupinder Singh (Manoj Pahwa) is having a rough week.  Sure, he's rich and powerful, with plenty of guns and a fancy car and a band of dubiously competent henchmen, but he was given his position as the city's crimelord by his father-in-law, and his wife Pammi (Upasana Singh) won't let him forget it for a second.  It's gotten so bad that even the people he's murdering keep calling him henpecked.  However, Bhupinder is distracted by his crush on supermodel Sweety (Surveen Chawla), and he has a plan to meet her at last.  A friend's son is getting married, and he arranges an invitation for Sweety.  She attends, he gets to meet her, and everything is great.

Unfortunately, someone took a picture of Bhupinder and Sweety together, and the photo is published in the newspaper.  Pammi is livid when she sees the picture, and Bhupinder has to think fast.  Fortunately, there's someone else in the photo, wedding band leader Lattu Singh (Diljit Dosanjh), professionally known as "Disco Singh."  He tells Pammi that Lattu is Sweety's boyfriend, and it's a simple matter to kidnap both Lattu and Sweety and force them to pretend to be a couple, at least until the detective Pammi hired (Chandan Prabhakar) accepts the story and gives up.

Sweety is furious; she only met Bhupinder once, and she has no intention of becoming his girlfriend, let alone dating a random musician in order to protect a nonexistent relationship.  On the other hand, it's literally a dream come true for Lattu.  He's been a devoted fan of Sweety's for years, and he's just happy to be near her.

Bhupinder tends to micromanage his hostages.  At first he insists that Lattu and Sweety stay four feet apart at all times, and Lattu carries a tape measure just to be sure.  That's not enough to fool the detective, so Bhupinder changes the rules; lattu and Sweety have to hold hands and smile at each other.  That's still not good enough, so Bhupinder insists on a public kiss, though it has to be a chaste one.

And it's the kiss that changes the relationship.  or rather, the lack of a kiss.  Lattu may be a disturbingly devoted fan, but he's also a good guy, and he's not going to force a kiss on a woman who isn't willing.  He brings her to his office so they can pretend to kiss behind closed doors, and after the obligatory misunderstanding she realizes that Lattu may be really annoying, but he's also a decent person.  She starts warming up to him, and they begin to grow closer.

However, Sweety isn't Lattu's only potential love interest.  He keeps saving Priya (Apoorva Arora) from the same gang of thugs, and while Sweety is slowly warming up to him, Priya is immediately smitten, so much so that she starts seeking out the thugs and asking them to harass her.  

And then the detective is finally convinced that the relationship between Lattu and Sweety is real.  He tells Pammi, and the game is over.  Lattu is free to go, as long as he never goes near Sweety again.  Of course Lattu isn't going to give up on his dream that easily, but he's missing some vitally important information

The plot of Disco Singh is similar to 1997's Yes Boss, starring Juhi Chawla and Shah Rukh Khan, but it's really a remake of the 2009 farce Do Knot Disturb, which was written and directed by my nemesis, David Dhawan.  This is a broad farce, in other words, so rather than an examination of societal double standards surrounding relationships you get Twenty One (B. N. Sharma) and Twenty Two (Karamjit Anmol), two incompetent henchmen who keep forgetting the dead body in the trunk of their car.  Twenty One and Twenty Two wear identical white suits, but they're easy to tell apart because Twenty One is the camp one.)  

Farce can be okay, though, and while Twenty One and Twenty Two aren't funny, the running gag involving another of Bhupinder's thugs (Deedar Gill) repeatedly getting shot in the backside wore me down through repetition.

As for the leads, Diljit Dosanjh and Surveen Chawla are both affable and charming.  I don't buy their relationship for a minute, but I'm not sure that matters.

I Dated a Robot!

Genre in Bollywood tends to be kind of fluid.  That's the old-fashioned masala formula; start with romance, add a heaping helping of family drama, mix in action and broad comedy to taste, and add a little spice with a sexy item number or two.  Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (2024) takes that genre mixing a step further.  It's not the first movie to mix Bollywood romance with science fiction, but it does commit to the genre blend instead of just applying sci-fi trappings to a typical romance.

Aryan Agnihotri (Shahid is a robotics engineer working in a near-future Mumbai.  He's handsome, charming, very skilled, and very, very single, which is a problem for his very traditional family, and especially his mother Sharmila (Anubha Fatehpuria).  They really want him to get married and start producing grandbabies, but Aryan is picky.  he's waiting for the perfect woman, and no one really understands apart from his cool grandpa Jai (Dharmendra).

Aryan accepts an invitation from E-Robotics CEO Urmila Shukla (Dimple Kapadia) to visit the corporate headquarters in California and see the big secret project she's been working on, and he cheerfully accepts, both because it's a chance to get away from his family's nagging and because Urmila is his aunt; they've always been close and it's a chance to spend some time together while working on cool robotics stuff.

Shortly after Aryan arrives, Urmila is called away to Belgium, leaving Aryan alone with nothing to do.  Fortunately her assistant Sifra (Kriti Sanon) is there to take care of him, and Sifra is . . . perfect.  She's beautiful, brilliant, highly efficient, and a fantastic cook.  She claims to speak every language, though Aryan has to teach her slang terms.  And she's clearly into him, flirting up a storm.  Aryan flirts back, and they spend the night together.

In accordance with the rules of comedy, Urmila returns the next morning as Aryan is preparing beans on toast.  Aryan tries to distract her or at least keep her out of his bedroom but Urmila marches in and discovered Sifra on Aryan's bed, unresponsive and not breathing.  Aryan wants to call a doctor, but Urmila calmly plugs Sifra back in and Aryan finally realizes that he slept with a robot.

Aryan might be freaking out, but Urmila is oddly calm.  In fact she's thrilled; she reveals that she arranged to be called away as a test, to see if Sifra could pass as a human, and it was a great success.  Aryan is less thrilled as he realizes that the woman he fell for was programmed to be his perfect woman.  Sifra is still efficient and attentive, but it's hard to be around her, so Aryan goes home early and tells his mother that he's ready for an arranged marriage.

The prospective bride is nice, but she's not perfect, and while Aryan goes through the motions for a while, he winds up sneaking away from the engagement ceremony.  Aryan is sad and lonely for a while, and then he has a genuinely terrible idea, the kind of idea that makes the plan in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke seem sensible and well planned out.  Aryan calls Urmila and convinces her to ship Sifra to India, to see if she can fool a traditional Indian family; it's market testing!  And then he calls his mother and introduces her to his new fiance, Sifra, then brings her around to meet the family.

What follows is the kind of comedic business that was common in Bollywood romances around the turn of the century.  One member of the romantic pair has a secret, and they try to protect that secret while still becoming a part of their new family.  There are inevitable misunderstandings and a little bit of slapstick, but it's all in good fun with a sci-fi twist, right?

Well, no, because the movie actually realizes that this is a terrible idea.  Sifra is Aryan's perfect woman because she was programmed to be Aryan's perfect woman, but she isn't human.  She doesn't have emotions, doesn't seem to have free will, and interprets instructions in the most literal way possible.  and since she's really a computer in pretty lady casing, she's vulnerable to the things that computers are vulnerable to, like viruses and power surges.  It has to end in disaster, though it will be a relatively family friendly disaster, because this is a comedy.

Sifra isn't human, but she still emerges as a complex and interesting character; she's eager to please, but because Urmila didn't program her with anything resembling Asimov's Laws, she's quickly entangled in a web of conflicting instructions and tries to integrate them into herself.  Aryan, on the other hand, is a much more flat character.  He manipulates everyone because he's kind of a selfish jerk, and he stays kind of a selfish jerk throughout the film.  He does learn the film's intended lesson, that it's better to risk being involved with a real and flawed person than to be consumed by an apparently perfect but ultimately fictional ideal (Don't Date Robots!) but the early scenes set up a valuable life lesson about how you treat the people around you, and Aryan never manages to learn it.

Despite the flaws, though, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Ulijha Jiya is a fascinating experiment with genre.  It doesn't just mix Bollywood masala romance with science fiction, it also turns that romance into a cautionary tale.