Aa Dekhen Zara
Synopsis:
Halfway through Aa Dekhen Zara, Neil Nitin Mukesh is sitting in a tiny, cluttered room staring at a heavily bruised camera lens while frantically trying to figure out if it can capture the future, and honestly, the sheer absurdity of watching a sci-fi thriller pop up in the middle of a standard Mumbai romance hits you like a truck. But to understand why he's obsessing over a broken antique, you have to look at how this whole mess started with him playing a broke, struggling photographer named Ray who can't pay his rent and spends half his time getting yelled at by his landlord and the other half trying to pitch cheesy portraits to uninterested magazine editors. He's just a regular guy in the grand tradition of moody heroes in hindi movies who can't catch a break, and his only real joy comes from hanging out with his quirky uncle who collects random junk and fixes broken cameras for a living. The funny thing is, that exact uncle leaves him a massive old-school camera that doesn't just take normal pictures, but prints out glossy, developing photographs of things that haven't actually happened yet, which is the kind of high-concept nonsense you only really get in bollywood where logic takes a backseat to pure entertainment value. So then, Ray takes the camera outside and snaps a quick photo of a street vendor, and right after that, a speeding truck loses control and smashes into the exact fruit cart he just captured on film, complete with flying oranges and dramatic slow motion that makes you laugh out loud at the sudden chaos. He realizes the camera is showing him tomorrow's news today, and instead of running away screaming, he decides the logical next step is to use this cursed device to win a local photography contest and score some cash. Right around this time, Bipasha Basu walks into the story playing Simi, a high-energy DJ with a fabulous wardrobe of neon jackets, chunky belts, and oversized hoop earrings that probably cost more than Ray's entire apartment building, and she's got this whole vibrant persona that completely clashes with Ray's dreary, perpetual bad-mood energy. Bipasha Basu brings this effortless charm to the screen, especially during a scene where she's standing in a chaotic Mumbai recording studio wearing a silver sequined top and arguing with a sound engineer about the bass levels on her new track while eating a soggy cheese sandwich out of a crinkled plastic bag. I still can't get over the absolute specificity of that sandwich bag and how she aggressively waved it around while making a point about house music tempos, because it had zero bearing on the plot and yet I watched it three times just to appreciate the commitment to random background acting. Anyway, Ray and Simi bump into each other when she hires him to take some promo shots for her club gigs, and they have instant chemistry despite him acting like a total weirdo who keeps checking his watch and staring nervously at his magic camera every five minutes.
They fall in love in that glossy, music-video style typical of many hindi films where they wander around dimly lit urban streets at night while neon signs blur in the background and a catchy pop track plays over the speakers. Ray uses the camera to predict stock market spikes and horse race winners, and suddenly he's rich beyond his wildest dreams, trading in his faded denim jacket for sharp designer suits and moving out of his dingy flat into a slick penthouse overlooking the city skyline. But wealth in these movies never comes without a massive catch, and Rahul Dev shows up playing a sinister mob-connected villain who figures out that Ray's supernatural luck isn't just a coincidence and wants the camera for himself so he can rig every criminal enterprise in the country. There's also Amrita Arora and Koena Mitra and Sophie Choudhary popping up in various dance numbers and side roles to add some extra glamour to the proceedings, because you can't have a proper trip through the world of bollywood movies without an obligatory sequence of glamorous people swaying under strobe lights in an overpriced nightclub. Ray's uncle warns him that every time he changes the future using the camera, there's a heavy cosmic price to pay, but Ray doesn't listen because he's too busy driving fast sports cars and buying expensive camera gear he doesn't need. The tension ramps up when the camera starts printing out photos of disaster, showing people getting hurt and terrible accidents that Ray desperately tries to prevent by running across town with his trusty lens cap off, panting and dodging traffic like an action hero on a sugar crash. He figures out that the villain is planning to steal the device during a massive underground gala, and after a wildly convoluted chase scene through a multi-level parking garage where cars crash into pillars and nobody calls the police, Ray finds himself cornered near the edge of a high-rise balcony. The villain demands the camera, but Ray holds it over the drop and yells that he'd rather smash it than let evil win, which leads to a frantic physical scuffle where punches are thrown and camera parts go flying everywhere across the concrete floor. The lens cracks completely in half, releasing a blinding flash of white light that shatters the mystical properties once and for all, leaving Ray and Simi standing alone in the quiet wreckage as the sun finally starts to rise over the city.
Ray drops the useless plastic shell of the broken camera onto the ground, takes Simi by the hand, and they walk out of the ruined garage together.
There is a specific kind of low-budget mid-2000s Hindi movie that relies almost entirely on the novelty of its premise to keep you from noticing that the monitors on the desk are not plugged into anything, and if I'm honest, Aa Dekhen Zara sits right in the middle of that very specific pile. You get this antique camera that develops pictures of tomorrow, which sounds like an episode of a syndicated sci-fi show from 1998 that got stretched out until someone remembered they had two and a half hours of celluloid to fill. The premise arrives without much fuss, dropping us straight into the life of Ray, a struggling photographer played by Neil Nitin Mukesh with the kind of permanent, furrowed intensity that suggests he is constantly trying to remember where he left his car keys. He takes pictures of junk and dreams of bigger things, living in a Mumbai that feels distinctly claustrophobic, captured through lenses that love blue filters almost as much as they love showing off the interiors of dimly lit bars where nobody ever seems to be drinking actual liquid.
Director Jehangir Surti handles the sci-fi elements with a strange sort of bashfulness, as if he is worried the audience might laugh if the magical camera looks too magical, so instead it just looks like a regular old SLR with a slightly dusty lens cap. When the photos start printing out early, showing tomorrow's front-page disasters and lottery wins, the film doesn't really know whether it wants to be a gritty noir thriller or a glossy music video starring people who spend an inordinate amount of time adjusting their leather jackets. The screenplay lurches forward in fits and starts, abandoning entire subplots about loan sharks and underworld syndicates for long stretches just so we can watch Bipasha Basu smile dazzlingly in a succession of club outfits that must have cost half the production budget. Basu plays Simi, a DJ whose primary dramatic function is to look glamorous under neon lights and occasionally ask Ray why he is acting so weird, a question that deserves a much longer answer than the movie ever provides. She isn't given much room to work outside of those parameters, but she brings a certain effortless kinetic energy to scenes that would otherwise sink under the weight of their own exposition, even if her character's backstory feels like it was written on the back of a napkin five minutes before shooting began.
Neil Nitin Mukesh had just come off Johnny Gaddaar when this dropped, a film where his cold-eyed detachment actually worked to his advantage, and seeing him try to pivot into a charming, regular-guy-next-door photographer feels a bit like watching a race car driver attempt to parallel park a delivery van in a narrow alley. He spends most of the runtime looking deeply stressed about the future, which is fair enough given what the camera keeps showing him, but it drains the proceedings of any casual charm. The supporting cast floats in and out with varying degrees of conviction, with Rahul Dev chewing on the scenery as a generic heavy whenever the plot needs someone to stand in a parking lot and threaten the protagonist, and Koena Mitra showing up for a dance number that stops the narrative dead in its tracks just when it was starting to figure out where it was going. Sophie Choudhary and Amrita Arora pop up too, mostly to fill out the background of various social gatherings and add to the general sense that everyone on screen is dressed by a stylist who had strong opinions about the color teal.
The cinematography by Mohanan leans heavily into high-contrast lighting and shadows that seem to exist solely to obscure cheap set construction, which works fine until the action sequences start and you realize the fight choreography was shot with so many quick cuts you could be watching a blender full of laundry. Speaking of small annoyances, there is a recurring audio cue—a weird, tinny digital screech that plays every time the magical camera takes a snapshot—that happens so frequently by the halfway mark you start wishing someone would take a hammer to the lens just to make it stop. Hindi movies have long had a complicated relationship with technological gimmicks, often treating gadgets like magical talismans rather than tools, and this one leans into that tradition with absolute sincerity, right down to the part where the hero has to outsmart the villains using a series of increasingly blurry Polaroids. The soundtrack, composed by Gourov Dasgupta and Mika Singh among others, throws a lot of techno beats at the wall, and while none of the tracks have the staying power of the best tunes from contemporaneous hits, the title track possesses a propulsive, late-night driving rhythm that almost justifies its third repetition during the climax.
What keeps the film from being a total wash is the underlying bleakness of its central conceit, which suggests that knowing the future doesn't actually help you change it, it just makes you miserable a few days earlier than you would have been otherwise. It is a cynical little idea hiding underneath a shiny, commercial wrapper, and whenever the movie remembers to lean into that cynicism, it gets genuinely interesting before cutting away to another song in a desert. There is no grand statement being made here about fate versus free will, nor does it manage to reinvent the standard Bollywood thriller template, and it certainly won't be remembered alongside the great genre experiments of its decade. It simply exists as a moderately entertaining, occasionally baffling artifact of a time when studios were willing to fund medium-budget genre experiments featuring rising stars and convoluted plots about supernatural photography. By the time the final confrontation rolls around in a disused warehouse that has featured in roughly five hundred other action pictures, you feel less like you have watched a complete narrative arc and more like you have survived a very long, very loud commercial break for a camera that doesn't actually exist, leaving you to wonder what you are going to do with the rest of your afternoon.