Anurag Kashyap’s new film Do Baaraa is an official remake of the Spanish film Mirage by Oriol Paulo, a director known for masterly twists and turns in his plots. (Another Hindi film inspired by one of Paulo’s films, The Invisible Guest, is Sujoy Ghosh’s Badla.) Kashyap’s adaptation, while it stays true to the original in its plot twists, has its unique universe, vibe and human anchor, and is riveting to watch.
Before we get into the loopy world of Do Baaraa, stylised as do:baara or 2:12 and headlined by a character named Antara played by Taapse Pannu, let’s accept it is easy to time-travel. To the past and to the future, and to realms that fork into the past and future simultaneously. We do it several times every day, by repeating patterns of behaviour, by day-dreaming so vividly that we feel transported in our beings, by letting out the exact sigh that we would when we are in the future, when the dream we are nurturing has come true. In new-age neuro-linguistic therapy, used in casual conversations these days, that kind of everyday time travel is a portal for “manifesting”.
In science fiction, where time travel is not just in the mind, it has bigger purposes to fulfil and bigger philosophical questions to answer—from H.G. Wells and Stephen Kings to Octavia Butler and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, the idea of transporting to different dimensions of time have propelled some great literature, and in turn, great movies.
As a fiction trope, time travel can never become dated, because no matter how much society progresses, or to what extent technology matures, human being are perhaps destined to make the same mistakes, over and over again. Whether characters spend a whole film travelling to multiple times or just to a near future, time travel plays in to the fascinating facet of being human: to believe in the impossible, and to conjure the power of second chances. Time travel can be adventure, historical fiction, romance, social commentary, mystery, humour, poetry—sometimes all of it together.
In recent times, director Christopher Nolan has spent a lot of time exploring the concept of time. His breakthrough movie Memento was a thriller told back to front about a man who had lost his short-term memory. As Nolan's films got bigger and more ambitious, he found different ways to manipulate time in movies like Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and most recently, Tenet, in which some of the characters and objects move backwards in time, a process the movie calls “inversion”.
In Do Baaraa, Kashyap’s doff to Nolan’s inversion kinetics, and the stylistic experiments that the form can facilitate, is obvious. But Do Baaraa is more. For one, Kashyap’s film, adapted from the original by writer Nihit Bhave, opens the window to more time-travel and sci-fi films in our cinema, a rarity now.
Do Baaraa opens in 1996. An electric storm lashes Hingewadi, Pune, one night. A 12-year-old boy named Anay, obsessed with his camcorder, witnesses a physical fight through his window in a neighbouring house. He is intrigued, and tries to find out what happened, and dies in an accident, precisely at 2:12 am or “do-baaraa”. Twenty-six years later, during the same kind of storm, the new resident of what used to be Anay’s house, Antara (Taapsee Pannu), connects with Anay through the footage on his old television set, again at 2:12 am. How that television set still exists in this house is unexplained; it’s just a convenient tool to propel the plot. Antara, knowing that Anay is doomed to die, prevents him from dying in the accident that would take his life. The next morning, Antara is a new being, in a parallel universe which she has herself calibrated. Earlier she was a nurse, now she is a surgeon. Now she is not a wife embittered by her unfaithful husband. She is no longer even mother to her seven-year-old daughter Avanti.
In emotional details, Kashyap’s film is rich, and that’s what sets it apart. That Antara deserves a second chance in her own life is as important as what Anay witnessed in the house next door—and the final clues to a ghastly, unreported crime.
Do Baaraa is a thriller with a neat ending arrived at with various twists, often so meandering and overwrought that you wonder how some parts of the action materialise or why some characters do what they do.
The film requires you to trust what seems implausible to finally understand as all the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle come together. It is racy, taut and laced with an efficient sound design.
Some standard Bollywood stamps, like songs mirroring Antara's emotions seem out of place and odd in the storytelling scheme. Pannu has the only significant role, and she brings out Antara’s hurry to solve the mystery she is trapped in and the underlying anxiety of losing her daughter with a brash energy that suits the film’s tone.
Pavail Gulati plays a police officer who helps her in this journey—another competent performance. Saswata Chatterjee as the neighbour has a meaty role but it isn’t explored enough to add more layers to the human dramas that augment the story.
Besides the clever and assured grasp over material and form, Do Baraa works because Kashyap and his writer can transcend the genre. Their protagonist is abidingly human and relatable—the best time travel stories often soar when they travel inside out.
Do Baaraa released in theatres on Friday
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