Robo Bride:
It must be a secret fantasy of many a male in metrosexual clothing—a woman who is beautiful and sexy, can cook well, talk sports, read his moods, anticipate his needs, obey him without question, and more importantly have no demands or desires of her own. If such a woman actually exists she must be a robot, which is the idea writer-director duo Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah have picked for their film with the tongue-twister title Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya. They have mixed elements of sci-fi, romcom and family drama and hoped the blend works, even with its overall silliness.
Classic science fiction needs suspension of belief, but it also creates a world that is entirely believable as a glimpse of the future; the world being taken over by robots or computers has always been a popular sci-fi trope and sounded an advance warning of letting science tamper too much with the natural order of things. This film experiments with technology of the future, with robots machines that have human bodies with computer brains. The US-based creator of such humanoids—Urmila (Dimple Kapadia) sees their function as caregivers and companions for the lonely, little does she anticipate her techie nephew Aaryan (Shahid Kapoor) falling in love with her Super Intelligent Female Robot Automation or Sifra (Kriti Sanon), one of her machines in testing stage.
Back in Delhi, Aaryan is constantly being hounded by his large, noisy family to get married. But he does not like any of the matches arranged for him, nor does he seem capable of finding a suitable bride for himself. Then he goes to visit his aunt, and meets Sifra—a robotics engineer himself, he is unable to recognize that she is a robot, even after he has been intimate with her.
Then, he takes her to India, to present her to the family, and they are thrilled with her beauty and accomplishment—she can cook for a dozen people in no time—and here the directors are able to mine some humour from Sifra’s tendency to take everything literally and act accordingly. But the absurdity of the situation, or the attendant risks of letting loose a robot in an unfamiliar and overcrowded setting is over simplified, and introduced much too late in the film.
There have been dozens of human-robot romance films like Making Mr Right, Ex Machina, Her, Eva, AI:Artificial Intelligence, and the poignant Lars And The Real Girl that examines the mental state of a man who treats a doll as human. Teri Baaton Mein… does not go into anything complex. The conflict in Aaryan’s love story is that the woman is not human—were she from a different culture or ethnic group, the difficulties would not be very different from what the film has portrayed. The plot had much more comic or even horror potential than what the directors have been able to tap. Some credit to them for at least attempting the sci-fi genre, when mainstream cinema is so content with the status quo.
Breaking the nerd techie stereotype, Shahid Kapoor is made to play Aaryan as arrogant and somewhat foolish—scrape the veneer and a Kabir Singh could emerge, who likes his women to be subservient; when things don’t go according to his fairytale, he is thrown. Kriti Sanon has fun playing the robot—her malfunctioning scenes are hilarious. Senior stars like Dharmendra (as the grandfather) and Dimple Kapadia are lost in the crowd, but it is good to see Hindi cinema cast a woman as a pioneering scientist.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
