‘Zara Hatke Zara Bachke’ Review: It’s Time Sara Ali Khan Learnt a Bit of Acting

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke

Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Sara Ali Khan, Inaamulhaq, Rakesh Bedi, Sharib Hashmi, Srishti Rindani, Neeraj Sood, 

Direction: Laxman Utekar

Rating: *1/2

Playing in theaters

Different films evoke different reactions and feelings. But only some very special ones elicit deeply depressing, existential questions about why Bollywood exists and why it keeps wasting everyone’s time, effort, money as well as precious bijli and paani by making films that serve no purpose other than to keep some stars employed.

Writer-director Laxman Utekar’s Zara Hatke Zara Bachke (ZHZB) is that sort of film — the kind that thinks it’s a comedy, but is really a bhayankar bore that leaves you feeling cheated and irritated.

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke’s story is directly inspired by director Bhim Sain’s 1977 film, Gharonda. Except that in ZHZB, it’s a young, newly-married couple trying to buy a house in Indore.

Kapil Dubey (Vicky Kaushal) and Somya Chawla Dubey (Sara Ali Khan) are much in love, but after their marriage they feel cramped in his parents’ house, where Kapil’s Mama and Mami also live. They have no privacy to make out. So, on her goading, they decide to book a fancy flat. But he’s a yoga teacher, she teaches at a coaching center and they can’t afford to pay for a flat plus the attached extra cost for parking, gym, club etc. 

Naturally, they stumble upon another plan — a sarkari Awas Yojna scheme. But to be eligible for that, Kapil can’t have any pucca house that he is to inherit. Somya can be eligible, provided she is single and has no house. 

This is the set-up and what follows is a convoluted plan to own a house. It involves a very loud lawyer, lots of lying, a rented apartment, family drama, a fake affair, a needlessly nosy building guard and a lesson about haves and have-nots.  

Zara Hatke Zara Bachke has a nice ensemble cast of actors. All except one are quite good. 

The film also looks good because it keeps showing us Indore’s Insta spots and delicious street food. And the issue it takes up is cute and relatable. But the film’s three writers — Maitrey Bajpai, Ramiz Ilham Khan and Laxman Utekar — don’t know where to take their story. So at the end, they settle for a dull, moralistic, melodramatic copout. Without the film’s climax, ZHZB’s 132 minutes felt like a waste of time, but with it, the film was so enraging that I wanted to go to the ticket counter to demand my money back. 

ZHZB has several problems, but let’s begin with the film’s title. The film is so tone-deaf to its own stupidity that it doesn’t even try to make its title fit the film’s story. Zara Hatke Zara Bachke — stolen from a Johnny Walker song in Raj Khosla’s 1956 hit film, CID — is like a cute pigeon head plonked on a donkey’s body. Wholly inappropriate and baffling.

The second problem is the film’s direction. Though Laxman Utekar has directed forgettable films with strong desi morals in the past (including Kriti Sanon’s Mimi), none was so off-key. 

Here Utekar’s direction is beset with two major blind spots. He can’t see that his comedy has no comic timing, nor does he see that his leading lady can’t act.

ZHZB seems to think that its comedic quotient is directly linked to how loud its actors can be. So actors are made to shout and overact, at times in unison.

The film has one joke that it repeats over and over despite the fact that the joke fell flat and died the first time it was attempted. 

In fact, the film’s screenplay and direction are so inept that ZHZB often doesn’t know what to do at the end of a scene, so it cuts to a glass aquarium and makes us watch a plastic, mechanical fisherman move his fish basket up and down, over and over. Whoever okayed this and thought it was funny should be made to stand in an aquarium and move a fish basket up and down for the rest of their life.

ZHZB irritated me immensely because in the film’s initial bits where Kapil is foregrounded, the film does have a decent comic rhythm going. That’s mostly because, a) Vicky Kaushal can act, and b) his character has a personality and a trait that has comic potential. Kapil is a penny-pincher, maha-kanjoos who can’t help but save money, including not leaving tips at restaurants.

Sadly, Kapil is madly in love with Somya. And this means that all of Vicky Kaushal’s attempts at making the film entertaining are thwarted by Sara Ali Khan’s terrible attempts at acting.

Sara Ali Khan has glowing skin and is very attractive, but she is unable to keep pace with Kaushal’s comic timing or match his acting. 

Her Somya is just a chatterbox whose one and only personality trait is that she keeps correcting Kapil about her full name — Somya ‘Chawla’ Dubey — as if plating this feminist flag will make up for the absence of acting ability and a properly written character.

Sara’s Somya wears printed georgette-chiffon sarees with mismatched blouses that have round, oblong holes and dangling strings to convey that she is a creature of small town India. But nothing about Sara Ali Khan is a small town. 

The fakery is too obvious and pronounced when she speaks in her terribly accented Punjabi, and even her nakhras and jhatkas are performed in that carefully choreographed Bollywood-diva-in-the-making style. 

There really was no reason for Zara Hatke Zara Bachke to exist except, perhaps, to give Sara Ali Khan reason to keep arriving at and departing from Mumbai airport. The Insta reels that those momentous occasions yield are way more entertaining than this annoying film.