‘Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya’ movie review: A social experiment with the heart of a sitcom

Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon submit themselves to a fantastic idea that doesn’t quite reach its potential, but provides moments of harmless fun as it probes the state of affairs in modern-day romance

As artificial intelligence finds its way into the deep recesses of human emotions, writer-director Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah have conjured up an unlikely romantic drama between a man and a machine that, after a laboured start, compels you to log out of logic to realise the matrix of modern-day relationships in a fun way.

Aryan (Shahid Kapoor) is a dashing robotics engineer in the Mumbai office of a US company run by his aunt (Dimple Kapadia). Not ready to commit to anyone, Aryan longs for compatibility and adaptability in a relationship. He makes fun of his friend for being in a marriage where he is being treated like a robot. His middle-class family in Delhi is so desperate to see him settled that Aaryan even gets dreams of being hitched to an ungainly bot. When his aunt calls him for a work assignment to New York, little does he know that he is going to be a lab rat for testing her aunt’s most advanced robot Sifra (Kriti Sanon).

He falls for Sifra’s flawless beauty and perfection in the kitchen and household chores, perhaps, because she is programmed according to his needs and says a cute theek hai to everything that he wants. But the problem begins when the engineer can’t resist her charm even after realising that she is just a piece of software and takes the experiment home.

The secret of Sifra has already been spelt out in trailers, but the emotional hook lies in how the central conceit becomes a metaphor for the demands that the Indian middle class places on its women, so much so that it often feels only a robot could fulfil them. Sifra doesn’t question the tradition and when she flounders, she gets the benefit of the doubt because she is ‘manufactured’ in America.

Nobody seems to mind that Sifra’s smile is plastic. It comments on the larger-than-life expectations of men from modern-day relationships that can only be achieved by a software program which carries specifically his memories and his choices. And if it pesters, there is always an option to switch her off, temporarily. By the end, it becomes a cautionary tale where the line between the real and the robotic begins to blur. When Sifra’s software begins to play tricks, she gets the same derisive looks that a bahu of the family would have received. Aryan tells the unsuspecting police officer that his fiancée has mental issues. The writers play on the word admin to bring out how men want to be in control but then the machines and women have their ways to survive and upgrade.

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However, as the idea is also to create a mass entertainer for those who are missing their sitcoms in the times of realistic content on streaming platforms, the makers keep it light and fluffy on the surface. From the length of the title to the treatment, there is an overt attempt to reach out to a family audience that grew up on I Dream of Jeannie and Small Wonder and later relished Karishma Ka Karishma and Bahu Humari Rajinikant in their living rooms.