Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri: Winding Narrative Drowns Out A Promising Premise

SAMEER VIDWANS' Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri (TMMTTM), the latest film backed by Dharma, brings back the eternal conflict: love or family? The production house has been forever concerned with this contention and has had leads in films pushed against the wall to make a choice. Even Karan Johar’s last directorial feature, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), explored this by recasting the discord as warring ideologies. TMMTTM attempts something similar but with far less fun.

It is not that the film doesn’t try. If anything, Vidwans' new work (he directed Satyaprem Ki Katha before this) travels a distance and undertakes an increasingly gruelling runtime to show that it indeed is having fun. The story quickly moves to Croatia, and during a yacht week (dotted with parties), the two leads, Rehaan (Kartik Aaryan) and Rumi (Ananya Panday), fall in love. For context, they had run into each other at an airport earlier and ended up sharing the same flight and itinerary. They bickered and fought, and soon, love was awaiting. A pivotal moment occurred when Rumi, an author, cried about getting poor reviews on her novel, and Rehaan consoled her, saying that he would give it 4 stars. At a time when critics as a profession are undergoing a crisis of faith, this isn’t a good sign, but the film insists we roll with it, and we do.

From here, TMMTTM, a great tongue-twister if there ever was one, shape shifts for a while. What had set out as a breezy romcom quickly alters in tone. Rumi’s father, Amar Wardhan Singh (Jackie Shroff), an ex-army officer and someone she constantly fought over the phone, meets with an accident. At around the same time, her sister, Jia (Chandni Bhabhda) informs that she is getting married to someone from Canada. This puts Rumi in a fix, and she breaks up with Rehaan, citing irrevocable differences. In other words, she needs to take care of her father and cannot afford to get married to the US-based Rehaan.

If this sounds flimsy, then the film plays a major part in it. The premise of a daughter forced to grow up and reckon with the fragile mortality of her parent is not outlandish, but in Vidwans' hands, this transfigures into one more obstacle in the path of love. The narrative becomes only more winding from here with Rehaan refusing to take no for an answer and landing up in Agra to coax her family as his mother, the inimitable Neeta Gupta, eggs him on.

The unending problems (Rumi relents, then her father agrees to move to the US, then Rehaan gets angry with Rumi) feel more manufactured than organic. The sense one gets is that Rumi and Rehaan are creating obstacles to earn legitimacy for their week-old love story. But also, for a film that seeks to confront a societal norm and maybe subvert it, TMMTTM invests the least in the female character.

Rumi is a writer (the only line we see her writing is, “And just like that I fell in love with him); she is also headstrong and outspoken. The film gives us a handful of instances, but for a narrative that insists that someone like her will be willing to give up everything to take care of her father, it lends little space to their relationship or even her. Both her defiance and profession are stitched with an artifice, crafting her more as an idea of a strong woman in someone’s mind. Panday is also inexplicably cagey in this role, carrying an uncertainty that is unbecoming of her recent turns.

Written by Karan Shrikant Sharma, TMMTTM is almost wholly about the distance a man will traverse to upend conventions for the sake of love, and Aryan is suitably watchable. When not leaning on Akshay Kumar’s mannerisms, the actor proves to be more effective in his comic timing, even as Rehaan borders on being annoyingly self-absorbed.

But even then, the journey turns out to be exhausting and tiresome. There is a germ of an interesting idea here: a daughter compelled to be a caregiver and unable to complain, but TMMTTM gives this little to no space to breathe. What we see instead is a man treating his love for his partner and mother with equal note and refusing to back down till he has his say. Where have we seen this before, you ask? Everywhere.