Vicky and Sara in Zara Hatke Zara Bachke. (courtesy: YouTube)

Cinematographer-turned-director Laxman Utekar’s third Hindi movie, Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, makes an attempt to mix broad strokes of humour with a sprinkling of mawkishness. It falls between two stools and finally ends up as an ungainly, misshapen heap of a film.

The greatest undoing of Zara Hatke Zara Bachke is the sheer predictability of the plot regardless of its uncommon central premise. A younger couple decides to interrupt their dwelling with a view to purchase a home. The daring ruse sparks a great deal of confusion, catches their households unawares and results in emotional turmoil that each one however drives their marriage to the bottom.

But does the movie ship real hilarity? No. Zara Hatke Zara Bachke hinges extra on outright horseplay than pure absurdist enjoyable. When the movie tries to be humorous, the actors are referred to as upon to fall again on bodily gesticulation and facial contortions to convey an air of mirth. It is all a tad too tiresome.

Utekar’s earlier Hindi comedy, Luka Chuppi, was a couple of live-in couple in Mathura pretending to be legally married to keep at bay the undesirable consideration of household and society.

Zare Hatke Zara Bachke is ready in one other small city, Indore, and revolves round one other couple pulling off a stunt that doesn’t go down properly with their orthodox family. Smacks of a components that has clearly outlived its utility.

Kapil Dubey (Vicky Kaushal), a miserly yoga teacher, and his spouse of two years, Somya Chawla Dubey (Sara Ali Khan), dwell in a cramped dwelling that has been inherited by the previous’s father (Akash Khurana) from his father.

Kapil’s maternal uncle and aunt dwell in the identical home, forcing him and Somya to surrender their mattress and sleep on the ground with a nosey nephew between them. It is clearly not what that they had bargained for.

Somya, who belongs to a Punjabi household from Gwalior, doesn’t get alongside along with her conservative in-laws, particularly with a perennially cantankerous aunt-in-law. Deprived of privateness, she goals of a house of her personal in opposition to the counsel of her overly stingy husband. But the condominium that Kapil and Somya zero in on seems to be past their price range.

At the teaching centre the place she teaches, Somya learns of a low-cost housing scheme mandated by the federal government. She sees in it a chance to interrupt free from the constricted world of her in-laws.

Somya and Kapil uncover that the eligibility norms are stringent and solely people with no property of their names can apply for the lottery. The couple can qualify for the scheme provided that Somya had been to turn out to be single once more.

At the behest of an area fixer, Bhagwandas Ishwardas Sahai (Inaamulhaq), they resolve to legally half methods. Kapil’s pal Manoj Bhagel (Himanshu Kohli) helps the couple file for divorce. The first time round, the choose advises Kapil and Somya to present their marriage one other likelihood.

While the divorce comes by means of after a hiccup or two and Somya then applies for a flat, the remainder of the script doesn’t go in keeping with plan. The movie, too, veers uncontrolled, lurching closely from one ham-handed twist to a different with out developing with any actual surprises.

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke is the type of movie that provides the actors no likelihood in any respect to seek out their approach out of the morass. Everybody within the forged, and that features the 2 leads, ham away to glory with a view to be heard above the din.

If the stereotype of the Punjabis being a loud, hard-drinking lot – the heroine’s Sikh father suits the invoice in each respect – is a downer, the movie over-compensates by projecting the hero’s puritanical Brahmin household as a brood that’s simply as over-the-top. Subtlety is not what the movie is on the lookout for, prefer it or lump it.

Notwithstanding the stray droll passages that the movie strings collectively within the first half, the wafer-thin and wayward household drama skids off the rails fairly rapidly and runs right into a surfeit of preachy mush by the point it will get to the enterprise finish.

Like most movies that begin off as comedies after which develop pretentions of being solemn weepies, Zara Hatke Zara Bachke, in its pre-climactic moments, throws in a medical emergency and a household go to to the hospital as a precursor to a tear-soaked spherical of revelations, confessions and apologies.

The performances from Vicky Kaushal and Sara Ali Khan because the fortunately married couple whose need for one another peaks within the face of the challenges that they encounter after which teeters on the sting of collapse are as wildly uneven because the movie itself. When they’re good, their chemistry is spectacular. When they don’t seem to be, they pull in numerous instructions.

Inaamulhaq, within the guise of a fast-talking comedian conman, delivers among the movie’s livelier moments, whereas Sharib Hashmi, who performs a migrant who works as a safety guard, turns up late within the movie to bolster its emotive quotient. Their efforts are wasted in a movie that’s weighed down by its personal convolutions.

Heed the warning embedded within the title: Zara Hatke Zara Bachke is a movie that’s greatest prevented.