Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri

Directed by Sameer Vidwans, the film Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri is proof that a film and it’s title can be overwhelmingly long. The title itself gives us adequate warning and feels like an endurance test, and the film faithfully lives up to it. By the midpoint, which feels like an eternity, one realizes that only half of the title has been addressed.

For some time, Dharma Productions has been wearing its progressive heart and beliefs on its sleeve. That’s all very well, what more do you want from the proponents of ‘rich lives matter’? Like the typical gloss and shine signature of its cinema, it can’t quite bid adieu to its glitzy USP. Any wonder then that the storyline spends the first half in picturesque Croatia. The ‘to-die-for’ locales of the European nation on the coast of the Adriatic Sea is where love blossoms between our two lovebirds.

Flip, frivolous and not as much fun as it aspires to be: that about sums up the first half of Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri. If you get through that phase of the film without switching off, the rom-com, post-intermission, stumbles with intent into family drama territory. The turnaround is as striking as it is surprising. The emotional core that Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri finds in the second half pushes the narrative out of a monotonous loop and towards a radical new direction. But that is not to say that everything that the film attempts, lands.

Several questions confront you as soon as you get into this rom com which marks the end of 2025. What do you do when the two leads who are meant to do the usual squabble-make-up-make-out thing exhibit zero chemistry from the get go? What happens when the film looks like a full-blown advert for a European country — Croatia in this instance — where the first half is set? What can you do when the characters look like they’ve been cobbled together without a thought of whether they gel as a family?

How to take a film seriously, which is titled Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri? Weird wordplay aside, Dharma Productions’ latest outing at the movies, starring Kartik Aaryan and Ananya Panday, comes at a time when the nation is still reeling under the Dhurandhar-induced nationalistic fervour. In such a case, the new film TMMTMTTM(even the abbreviation is tiresome) should have helped in breaking the norm with its soft romance. After all, it stars Aryan, a man known for his soft boy romance and comic timing. But director Sameer Vidwans’ film, by the end of it, reiterates Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’s tag line, ‘It’s all about loving your parents’. The result is a very middling story that talks more about sacrifice and compromises than love.

After making headlines with the Oscar shortlist, Dharma Productions goes homebound with a tourism advertisement for Croatia, interspersed with product placement for the bronzer look of its fair-skinned lead actress. Masquerading as a breezy, feel-good romantic comedy that imparts the warmth of family values during winter break, it feels like an addition to the aspirational calendar of wedding and honeymoon ideas that the production house delivers every year to towns of different tiers.