What if you could go back in time and alter an incident, setting off a ripple effect that would change the entire course of your life? It’s a universal wish as old as time, as cherished as a fairytale, and the reason why time-travel films are as popular as they are. However, not too many Hindi filmmakers have been curious (or brave) enough to dabble in this genre. But Anurag Kashyap has built a career on walking the road less traveled. Dobaaraa is his latest attempt at challenging himself, his craft, and the vagaries of space and time.
It’s the story of Antara (Taapsee Pannu), a nurse and a mother of a young girl stuck in a marriage susurrating to get undone. She has just moved in with her cheating husband (a fantastic Rahul Bhat) and daughter at a bungalow in a posh Pune locality. It’s 2021. One night she invites friends over for housewarming dinner and finds out about the tragic story of her house’s previous owners. Their 12-year-old son Aney got killed by a speeding truck 25 years ago on a similar night, when Pune was struck by a powerful geomagnetic storm, not too different from the one clouding the present, threatening to blow everything apart.
And it does. At around 2 am, Antara accidentally connects with the 12-year-old Aney of 1996 through his old TV and video camera. Aware that he is about to die in a few minutes, she implores him to not leave the house. He does it nevertheless. But because of Antara’s intervention, he gets delayed by a few minutes, and the fire truck that was supposed to hit him at 2.12 am misses him by a whisker. And so Aney, who should have been dead, continues to live. But little does Antara know that this unwitting altering of the past will change her future too.
She wakes up to a parallel life in which Aney is alive, she is not married and is a successful surgeon, like she was poised to be in college. But unable to accept it, she constantly feels like an intruder in this new reality and searches for her missing daughter. In trying to make sense of her altered circumstances, she bumps into a young police inspector (Pavail Gulati), the only one who seems to believe her bizarre time-travel story.
Dobaaraa is the official Hindi adaptation of Oriol Paulo’s 2018 Spanish film Mirage. This is Pannu’s second Hindi remake of a Paulo film; she previously starred in Sujoy Ghosh’s 2019 crime thriller Badla, which was an adaptation of Paulo’s 2016 directorial The Invisible Guest.
Because so much happens with Antara within a span of two days, she is constantly on the go. Though Pannu manages to match up with the film’s relentless pace and bring an urgency to the goings-on, her performance is rather flat. Sure, Dobaaraa succeeds at getting you curious about what will happen next, but it does not give you any time to breathe for it all to sink in. As a result, you don’t feel as much as you see.
There are a few other rough edges too. Antara’s ready bonhomie with Gulati’s inspector feels forced. Saswata Chatterjee plays another version of Bob Biswas, his popular assassin from Kahaani (2012). For an actor as terrific as him, he is straddled with a painfully underwritten, one-dimensional character that doesn’t have much to offer. Kashyap, who usually has a brilliant ear for music, fails to create any impact with Dobaaraa’s background score. Instead of complementing the narrative, throughout the film, it dictates you how to feel.
But courtesy Mirage’s gripping plot, all these inconsistencies look trifle in the larger scheme of things. Dobaaraa is a sleek, smart thriller that rises beyond the obvious and raises several pertinent, philosophical questions about choices, second chances, motherhood, and soulmates. Packaged as a time-travel fantasy, it is essentially a love story — of a woman for her offspring and establishes how being a mother is irrevocable. Once you become a mother, you continue to be it even if everything else about and around you changes.
Though it’s not as quirky or outlandish as Looop Lapeta, another Pannu film (the official remake of the German classic Run Lola Run) that released earlier this year, Dobaaraa dares to go where Looop Lapeta didn’t. It breaks the façade of ‘the best life’ and goes on to suggest that each version comes with its own select set of challenges, each altered reality is just as real — as messy and complex.
Whatever The Time Traveller’s Wife — another mind-bending work of fiction that disrupts and interrogates the established constructs of the time-space continuum — may have you believe, Looop Lapeta, and now Dobaaraa, advocate the contrary. They suggest that even if we may not have the power to time travel, all of us have the choice to redirect, rechart, and rewrite our lives till we find our equilibrium. That there are many ways to live and many alternate realities. All we need to do is believe that we deserve it. The rest will follow.
Read other pieces by Sneha Bengani here.
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