Movie Review – Barfi (Hindi) – Don’t Worry, Be Barfi..!!

“Let Barfi be!” and all was an eternal saga of romance, sacrifice, and unconditional love!!

The road less taken is taken for a reason and Barfi is a living testimony to this adage. With this film Anurag Basu embraces motley of surprises such a genre-defying cinema could plausibly offer. The film goes into our hearts as a beautiful, heart-warming story, albeit there is some piece de resistance in the mystical land Basu creates - something that is itself a medium through which he tells his multiple timeline story. With poise and craft induced in almost every scene, he leaves no room for gloom and contrition. Anurag Basu disinters the innate Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of the path-breaking French film Amelie) in him to create a world of capricious and unfeasible set design.


Barfi is not about cinematically caricatured characters, or exaggerated performances, or even forced emotions. The tour de force lies in the carving of three seemingly normal yet living in a mental twilight characters. They stand on three vertices of the triangle and the flow of events merges them into the centre. That’s mathematical, but shown in a way philosophical in the film. Imagine this – a mainstream Bollywood film with a deaf and dumb protagonist and an autistic female lead without the accentuated levels of Bhansali melodrama, something that’s pleasingly alarming and difficult to stomach. Only Basu could pull off such an act with aplomb.


Ranbir Kapoor plays Murphy, or Barfi. He charms with his Chaplin antics and always tries to be on the run. This trait of his does not leave him when he’s wrinkling and withering on the bed. He shows his intellect and innovation as he takes on this role. The character’s silence comes handy to introduce silent movie theatrics and slapstick, and it pays off well. Ranbir sticks to the same pitch throughout the film thus making the character’s transition seamless and convincing - a whimsy young man, a jester, a doomed lover, a person afflicted for losing something adorable, and many more. Now, he is Bollywood’s most talented actor, with the astuteness and élan he shows in cherry-picking his roles.

Ileana plays Shruti for whom Barfi falls head over heels, and what follows is a fickle yet fairy tale like romance that ends abruptly. After watching her portray dumb-witted-damsel roles in Telugu and Tamil films, this one is refreshing and marks a staggering leap for her Bollywood career. In one of the scenes, her naiveté and nonchalance is vivid when she says, “Yeh Khamoshi hi pyaar ki jubaan hai.” During the course of the film, she evolves as an expressive actor exuding charisma. The role essayed by her translates into a seemingly tough one owing to the beat-all-conventions-romantic genre of the film. Through out the film, Shruti’s life is on tender hooks with relatively hackneyed predicaments, but she seems like a broken thread from a beautifully woven tapestry.  


Priyanka Chopra as an autistic Jhilmil is Basu’s trump card and is surprises galore. Jhilmil is a child, and Priyanka inhabits all child-like nuances to get into the character through every possible way, but also becomes painful to watch at times. The emotion her role should garner becomes slightly inopportune and superficial – a writer’s fault for not fine tuning her role. A series of events bring Jhilmil close to Barfi, and their daunting but joyful journey together spans for many years. All the dosage of ‘old is gold’ style romance – a rarity in Bollywood these days - has been brought to screen, thanks to Basu.  

Barfi has also got some setbacks. The second half drags over by at least half an hour and nothing miraculous happens towards the end. The conclusion is not neat and looks half-baked; it doesn’t even offer any satiating treatment for the story that ties the characters together, except for some unfolding of events loaded with intrigue. Basu who’s always been a consummate storyteller tries to incorporate idiosyncrasy in the script in captivating ways. The film-maker’s biggest achievement comes when the audience loves Barfi for what he is, and not for what he could have been. The film, with its time-shifting narrative, strikes the emotional chord with a right mix of subtle and shrewd performances by the lead and the supporting cast.

Superlatives become mandatory to describe, analyze and appreciate the music and background score by Pritam and intensely endowed sound design by Shajith Koyeri (won a National award for Omkara). You will be aghast while you listen to strings in his compositions, and please wait till the end credits to see the humongous team that’s part of the music department. The entire recording was done in two different studios in London and the BGMs go on to become myriad embellishments for the film.  

Ravi Varman’s cinematography lends the film an appealing, often magnified, rustic aura. The movie’s location shifts between Darjeeling and Kolkata. The fog and mist coupled with steam engines sets a perfect template for Darjeeling whereas the guerilla photography comes to forefront in canning a chase sequence in Kolkata. He complements the film-maker’s muse by selectively framing the Hooghly in the backdrop of some scenes and painting a large canvas of greenery-soaked rural landscapes of Bengal. This makes your view on the city and its surroundings more romantic. Perhaps, in some scenes, the visual panache subdues the characters inhabiting them.

Bottom-line: Barfi is a gently flavored, soothing savory, blended in perfect proportions of sugar and other ingredients to make it palatable. It is more than capably executed by Anurag Basu with the right message - “Zindagi mein kushiyaan choti choti cheezon mein hoti hain.” He unusually engrosses you in his world of sounds and long-winded stillness, beating the stardom of two superstars to pulp and sensitively weaving a magical world around them. The film is a visual, comical and musical joie de vivre replete with emotions, and the storytelling leaves you optimistic, revivifying a lost faith in archaic style of unconditional loving.

My Rating: Expectation – 6/10; Reality – 8/10