Why cinemagoers may be unforgiving of Rajkummar Rao's ‘Bhool Chuk Maaf'

India Today

26-05-2025

Ranjan (Rajkummar Rao) and Titli (Wamiqa Gabbi) want to get married. Time won't allow them to. Funnily, it's running time which the makers struggle to move along in this comedy about Ranjan's tryst with time to reach his final destination.The plot is the least of problems for Bhool Chuk Maaf. In fact it's the only ingenious bit in the film. It's the characterisation of the lead hero, Ranjan, which makes this a hard pill to swallow. If one is to root for this guy's predicament, one's unable to because on paper there's not much appealing about him. His ambition is simple: get a government job so as to marry his sweetheart; the means to go about it are questionable and ultimately off-putting. It makes Titli's penchant for him all the more puzzling. Love does have mysterious ways, but surely idiocy isn't one.advertisementThe first 45 minutes the film trudges along with umpteen songs acting as disruptors to show the couple's attempt to find a sarkari naukri within a stipulated time. Once that hurdle is crossed, Ranjan eagerly awaiting his wedding day finds himself stuck in a swamp pit of time wherein the penultimate day before the wedding keeps repeating itself. Until Ranjan figures out the root of his problem, audiences have to endure the equally desperate attempts to induce laughs.Bhool Chuk Maaf is the kind of film where the decibel levels are always high—it's the misguided belief that the louder the delivery, the likelier the joke's ability to land. Rao does most of the heavy-lifting, but there's now something overly familiar and predictable about this small-town lover boy and gullible fool act. There's irritability at not being understood or believed; the one scene where he lets loose in a physical act, there's the quickfire delivery. Despite playing these familiar tropes, writer-director Karan Sharma struggles to hold the narrative together.advertisement
There are brief moments of relief, especially when Ranjan has to make sense and resolve the trouble around reliving a day again and again. But Sharma can stretch the premise only for so long and is unable to delve into the harrowing emotional fallout of being trapped in a messy loop. By the time the last act arrives and the moral conundrum rises, setting up a preachy monologue to absolve the protagonist of his many fallibilities, it's too late.In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand writes that the most depraved type of human being is a man without a purpose. Bhool Chuk Maaf has good intent but lacks a clear purpose. And even when it finds one, the moral posturing is loaded and anodyne. 'Sahi ko chunna bahut mushkil hota hai,' says Sanjay Mishra's fixer in a lecture that touches on humanity, Bhagat Singh and doing the right thing. It isn't enough for Bhool Chuk Maaf is incredibly loud and extremely monotonous.Subscribe to India Today Magazine