I am yours and you are mine and I am going to say it twice because it’s that kind of a film.
Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri, TMMT for short, is about 2025 hook-up culture meeting 1990s-style Bollywood romance. This isn’t a brilliant insight – it’s a line from the film, which makes sure to spell out everything that is brewing between Rehan (Kartik Aaryan) and Rumi (Ananya Panday).
He’s from Los Angeles and she’s from Agra. He runs a wedding planning business with his cool cat singleton mother Pinky (Neena Gupta). She writes romance novels. Rehan and Rumi meet during a holiday in Croatia. Rather, Rehan runs into Rumi and then imposes himself on her in the creepy way that Hindi film heroes do in the name of love.
Rehan’s aggression and Rumi’s feeble protests ensure that the ardour shifts from one-sided to mutual. Marriage is on the cards until Rumi declares that she simply cannot leave her widowed father Amar (Jackie Shroff) and move to America with Rehan. Amar seems healthy enough – he’s in his early sixties – but conspicuously falls ill just so that this movie can justify itself.
Written by Karan Shrikant Sharma and directed by Sameer Vidwans, TMMT is one-third extended Croatia tourism commercial (various locations are helpfully labelled) and one-third wedding video. The rest is devoted to paying tribute to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, the 1990s gold standard for conservative, family-friendly romance.
There are times when TMMT feels like it’s been written by a teenager who has watched DDLJ far too many times for his health. Much of the risible dialogue is obsessed with replicating Gen Z speech and carping at perceived wokeness. The fact that Kartik Aaryan yells out his lines doesn’t make them any better.
The needlessly lengthy 145-minute film lurches from one lazily written scene to the next. The story picks up pace rather late, as Rehan and Rumi wonder whether to choose each other or their parents.
There’s a fun chaotic sequence in which everybody gets drunk and behaves badly. But the shadow cast by DDLJ is large enough to eclipse whatever TMMT wants to say about how young people balance individual desire with domestic responsibilities.
It’s hard to get what the fuss is about. It’s tougher to abide by a hero who declares in all seriousness that he wants his lover to marry him and his mom.
Miscast as a chest-baring stud over whom women of all ages and gay men drool, Kartik Aaryan is most comfortable playing the self-obsessed alpha male who just happens to be the perfect partner. Ananya Panday’s Rumi waffles about for the most part, too ineffectual to be taken seriously either as a writer or a devoted daughter.
