Zara Hatke Zara Bachke follows a couplle who want a house of their own away from their family and use the Indian Government's flagship program Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) to get it.
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We enter the world of Chawlas and Dubeys thinking it's going to be a laughter riot with some fresh humour, edgy characters and a storyline that doesn't rely on usual, tried and tested tropes that Bollywood films are used to. And Zara Hatke Zara Bachke makes us believe as it takes off that everything is quite normal and relatable. But, it all soon turns into a loud cringefest with actors overacting beyond our imagination, dramatic dialogues being said one after the other, a joint middle-class Pandit family living in a small house and Punjabi stereotypes served to us on a platter because there is a 'chant' bahu who they believe has lured their son and accidentally made them all have a cake that contained 'egg'.
I never could wrap my head around movie trailers that give out the entire plot. Makers of Zara Hatke Zara Bachke made it worse with two trailers that revealed more than they should have and left very little for us to watch and find out on our own. Directed by Laxman Utekar, the romantic comedy has a lot going on at the same time and it does leave you with many questions at many placesSet in a small town of Indore, we are introduced to college sweethearts Kapil Dubey (Vicky Kaushal) and Somya Chawla (Sara Ali Khan), who are happily married and living in a small house alongwith Kapil's vegetarian and religious family – his parents, maternal uncle and aunt and their young son. While Kapil is a yoga instructor, kanjoos and with a middle-class mentality, Somya comes from a modern Punjabi family, is quite outgoing, makes more money giving coaching classes and dreams big in life. The two are the happiest with each other but Somya does feel the pinch of not having any privacy in the house and is desperate to get her own dream house soon.
Since they can't afford heavy EMIs, they fall for a government scheme and end up faking a divorce to be eligible for a lottery allotment. Pretending to hate each other, they separate and start to live separately. How far this drama goes and what's the fate it eventually meets forms the plot.
At 132 minutes, the film doesn't look dragged or needlessly stretched, but definitely has its high and low moments. While the high never gets to a point that it makes you go wow, the lows are definitely loaded with flaws and loopholes.
The story that Utekar has co-written with Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan, starts of on a very funny note and keeps the momentum going with harmless jokes, natural light-hearted humour and some comic punches. But post interval, it just meanders without any direction and goes off track.
At this stage, I really wish it stuck to being a romantic comedy and not get so melodramatic at places it didn't require to. The script has nothing that you haven't already seen or something that will leave you in splits. If anything, it only gets a bit predictable in the second half and comedy of errors is only left with errors. The flaws in writing and direction are tough to overlook.