Time To Time:
Time travel has fascinated authors as far back as the late 19th century, with great writers like Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-1889) and HG Wells (The Time Machine– 1895) working with it; altering history by tampering with the space-time continuum became a staple of the sci-fi-fantasy genre. It was inevitable that cinema pick up on it as soon as rudimentary special effects were possible.
Messing-with-the-mind kind of time travel and parallel universes appeared in early serials like Star Track (1966) and were amped up by films like The Terminator (1984) and Back To The Future (1985), which actually made sense within the realm of possibility in that genre. Sci-fi did not catch on in a big way in Indian cinema, so even Anurag Kashyap, paying tribute to the master of the cinematic mind-twister, Christopher Nolan, attempts an easy to digest time-loop thriller with Dobaara (also the time Do Baara or 2.12, when strange things happen), an official adaptation of Oriol Paulo Spanish film, Durante la Tormenta or Mirage (2018). (Paulo’s clever crime tale The Invisible Guest has already been remade in Hindi as Badla). Kashyap reportedly read the script of Mirage before the movie was made, which is why it is not a frame-by-frame copy, though major plot points obviously remain.
In 1996, in a colony of Pune’s Hinjewadi, Aney (Aarrian Sawant), a kid with a penchant for making home movies and the morbid curiosity to investigate strange noises in his neighbour’s bungalow, even in the midst of a storm, is run over by a vehicle and killed. Twenty-five years later, Antara (Taapsee Pannu), her husband (Rahul Bhatt) and daughter Avanti have moved into the same house, and learn about the tragedy from their dinner guest, who was Aney’s childhood buddy. There is a freak storm brewing which causes all manner of geo-magnetic mayhem and turns the old TV (still lying around the house!) turns into a portal through which Aney can communicate with Antara. The kid is not too surprised by the woman from the future on his TV screen, since he is a fan of The Terminator; Antara warns him against going out and he listens. However, in saving his life, Antara changes the past, so that the future is also altered.
In the new reality, Antara is not married to Vikas and Avanti does not exist. She runs about frantically trying to return to the old timeline and reunite with her daughter, and the only one who is willing to believe her and help is a cop (Pavail Gulati).
With plots like this (carefully adapted by Nihit Bhave), the viewer has to believe the internal logic of the story, even if they often go, “Hey, wait a minute…how did this happen?” If Antara’s adventure is engaging—which it is—then the questions have to be dropped. It is a jig-saw puzzle of a film, in which the parts are meant to be found and fixed by the end, or what went before will fall apart.
Taapsee Pannu looks suitably bewildered and harried, and the only other actor who has enough of a role to match her is Gulati. Saswata Chatterjee (of Bob Biswas fame) as the murderous neigbour, appears in a role that could have been done by any actor.
There is a lot of VFX thunder, lighting and rain; and the pace is kept brisk enough to prevent the viewer from nit-picking. Kashyap’s version is actually more interesting and emotionally engaging than Mirage. If audiences accept it, a portal may just open in Hindi cinema for the sci-fi genre.
(An edited version of this piece first appeared in scroll.in)
