Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri Review: Flip, Frivolous, And Not As Much Fun

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.

Especially awry are the droll passages that alternate awkwardly between the passably piquant and the avoidably patchy. But because in its tail is a twist that turns the soul and substance of an Indian wedding on its head, the occasional aberrations don't inflict lasting damage.

Produced by Dharma Productions and Namah Pictures and helmed by Sameer Vidwans (whose last release was Satyaprem Ki Katha), the film is all about loving your parents, a clash between apno (one's near ones) and sapnon (one's dreams), and weaving a 90s-style love story set around a present-day hook-up culture.

Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri  is Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge primed for audiences that, even in 2025, haven't fully shrugged off mores of the past even as they look for modern, unencumbered relationships. The film tries something new without abandoning its Bollywood romantic fantasy moorings. It works best when it lets go of the past and revels in that act.

Towards this end, it is served well by the new Dharma Productions leading man Kartik Aaryan - he is allowed by Karan Shrikant Sharma's script to take a pointed swipe at "nepo kids" (who haven't "come up the hard way") - and the seasoned Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta as single parents, baby boomers with idiosyncrasies that test their children, the heroine and hero respectively.

The actors, including Ananya Panday (when she isn't stuck in palpable wobbles of the screenplay's making), go great guns for the most part and guide Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri through, and eventually out of, choppy waters.

The character of a Gen Z girl that Panday plays - Rumi Vardhan Singh, daughter of Vir Chakra-winning ex-Indian Army colonel Amar Vardhan Singh (Jackie Shroff) - is severely hamstrung by overt contradictions leading to convolutions that, in turn, leave behind a trail of confusions.

Rumi is supposed to be a seeker, but she makes heavy weather of her voyage of discoveries. She is a feminist but she is not averse to letting herself go with the flow created by a young man who defines his self-possession as a case of "I'm sexy and I know it."

She is an author of romances - fittingly, the girl meets the boy in an airport bookshop - but she is never seen engaged in the act of writing. A book reading session is bunged in late in the film with the sole purpose of paving the way for a turning point that sparks the climactic choices that lovers make.

The superficiality of the engagement between the two diametrical opposites often takes the sheen off the love that blossoms between them on a picture-postcard journey through the Croatian cities of Split and Hvar - here, the film looks more like a flighty travelogue than a focused journey movie - before circling back to Agra where a wedding, not theirs, creates problems even as it throws up new possibilities.

Caught between a desire for independence and a sense of guilt at not being there for her ageing father, Rumi hems and haws her way through the accidental affair that begins on the Croatian holiday.

She is compelled to share a yacht cabin with Aaryan's Ray (shortened Anglicised form of Rehan), a sojourn that sees the two young people fall head over heels for each other after the inevitable initial frictions. It takes the couple less than ten days to infer that they are made for each other.

Then, the real world intervenes. Rumi - for Ray, she's simply "Roomie" - has an ageing father, a sleepwalking cafe owner, back in their Agra home to worry about. He needs his meds on time and one of his two daughters - the elder one, Jia (Chandni Bhabhda) is set to fly the coop with a Canadian-Indian groom - has to be around 24X7 to ensure he does not miss any dosage.

Ray and his wedding-planner mom, Pinky (Gupta), are based in Los Angeles and marrying him would separate Rumi from her dad. So, she decides to sacrifice her love at the altar of filial duty. It is now Pinky and Ray's turn to pull out the stops with a plan to turn the needle in the boy's favour.

This tussle between a mamma's boy and a doting daughter of a dad who needs her more than anything else in the world has its moments. Sometimes fatuous, sometimes facile, the tale finds a way through a string of wishful and wayward throws of the dice.

The final chapter of Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri is sparked by a bout of Bacchanalian excess triggered by spirited characters who have had a bit too much drink in the course of a Sangeet ceremony laced with a bunch of retro Bollywood numbers.

Tongues are loosened, heated and misdirected words are exchanged, and a wedge is threatened to be driven between Rumi and Ray. But, as is the case with most such films, the conflict is followed by a crisis that forces everybody to see things in a fresh light.

Between all the froth that it generates and the flashes of inspiration that it taps occasionally, Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri is a bit like it's a-bit-of-a-mouthful title. It does not flow without a slip or two but does, in the end, make enough sense to pass muster.