Bareilly ki Barfi is more of a package than a film, formula films of Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna trying to get a girl and finding a lost father have always been successful but in the 70’s. No one is finding a father in this film but 2 heroes against each other trying to get a girl who is confused between the 2 just does not work to Indian sensibilities now. Story of the film revolves around Bitti Mishra (Kriti Sanon), who lives in a small town called Bareli but carries big dreams and a modern lifestyle, basically Priyanka Chopra in reverse. Bitti watches Hollywood films, break dances to hip hop and no one understands her mindset in Bareli so she just wants to run away from all this. This kind of a character was new in early 2000’s invented by Yashraj to catch upto rural audience as well and we thought it was done and dusted.
Bitti finds some articles about her in a local magazine which goes by the name of Bareilly ki Barfi and wants to meet the writer as the articles are about her. Chirag Dubey (Ayushman Khurana) is a local boy who is friends with Bitti and she asks him to find Pritam Vidrohi (Rajkumar Rao). Chirag finds Pritam and asks him to behave in a vulgar way so that Bitti starts disliking him and gates get open for Chirag. Plot is so old and uninteresting that it seems like a folklore while packaged with Baarat songs and slow numbers which just shout cliche to the audience.
Screenplay of the film is full of gags and actually tries to find a story with in this bizarre plot. Everyone had high hopes from Ashwini Iyer Tiwari post her simple yet touching directorial debut Nil Batte Sannata but she gave up those things for movie stars and box office collections. Rajkumar Rao is an extraordinary performer and tries to breathe some life in this film but gloriously fails to do so. Ayushman Khurana is inherently a Punjabi and fake U.P. accent just killed his performance, while he tries to row a boat in the ocean of lava. Kriti Sanon has amazing consistency despite the fact that she has been called a complete non-actor pretty face and her films are also not working, she does not even tries to act.
Kriti Sanon has no intentions of playing a character, it seems as though she is just waiting for the shot to be over and run into her make up van. Kriti Sanon is definitely not going to have a long career in films, if she does not get over the mirror and focus into lenses. Bareilly ki Barfi is a highly mediocre film with no efforts to put something interesting on celluloid, one may miss as there are a lot of other options this week.
