Ranveer Singh wears about fifteen different pairs of sunglasses in the first twenty minutes of Befikre, and if I'm honest, I spent more time trying to figure out if they were Gucci or Ray-Ban than I did listening to his character explain his personal philosophy on relationships. The movie starts with a breakup that feels less like an emotional rupture and more like a scheduling conflict negotiated over expensive cocktails in a Parisian bar that looks entirely too clean to have actual locals drinking in it. Dharam is a stand-up comedian who mostly does bits about how much he hates commitment while wearing exceptionally fitted leather jackets. Shyra is a tour guide who takes couples to see the catacombs and then yells at them in fluent French when they leave trash on the cobblestones. They make a pact to be friends with benefits without any of the messy feelings that usually ruin these cinematic arrangements, a premise that has powered approximately four hundred romantic comedies since the nineties without ever getting any more convincing. Aditya Chopra directs this thing with the frantic energy of a man who was told that if the camera stopped moving for even four seconds the audience would walk out and demand their money back. Every single scene is lit like a luxury car commercial shot during the golden hour in a city that municipal authorities apparently scrubbed down with bleach every night. The screenplay relies heavily on a series of dare-based flashbacks that attempt to establish these two people as rebellious free spirits refusing to conform to the traditional expectations of middle-class romance. They dance in their underwear on a crowded rooftop. They crash a wedding and eat all the shrimp. They get arrested for streaking near the Seine and then laugh it off in the back of a police cruiser like they are starring in a perfume ad funded by a multinational conglomerate. It is all terribly slick and deeply exhausting.

Ranveer Singh has this kinetic, rubber-band sort of physical presence that can carry a scene even when the dialogue sounds like it was generated by an algorithm designed to appeal to diaspora millennials who only visit Mumbai once every three years. He hurls himself into the frame with a level of intensity that makes you wonder how long his knees will hold out. Vaani Kapoor matches his physical exertion stride for stride, though her character is written with such aggressive coolness that you can practically hear the wardrobe department screaming through her leather skirts. When they fight, they do it with a volume and velocity that suggests they are trying out for a touring production of an angry modern play rather than filming a standard romantic comedy for the Hindi film industry. The supporting cast floats in and out of the narrative like expensive props, occasionally dropping a line of accented English or French before disappearing back into the beautifully blurred background of a café terrace. Elisa Bachir Bey shows up as a French architect who threatens to disrupt the central duo's carefully maintained casual arrangement, but the script gives her about as much psychological depth as a cardboard cutout standing outside a cinema hall. There is a strange disconnect between the actors and the environment they inhabit, as if everyone on set was working from a slightly different translation of the script.

Paris has been filmed a million times before, but never quite with this specific brand of glossy tourist-board neutrality that strips the place of any grit, grime, or actual human chaos. The cinematography by Kannan Arunachalam treats every street corner and bridge as a blank canvas for lens flare and high-contrast skin tones. You get the distinct impression that nobody involved in the production ever walked down a normal residential street or had to deal with the damp smell of the metro in winter. Vishal-Shekhar supply a soundtrack that thumps and swells with the relentless enthusiasm of a nightclub DJ who refuses to read the room. The title track gets recycled at least four times too often, usually right when you were hoping the film might settle down into a quiet moment between characters who are supposedly falling in love. It is a loud, brash collection of tracks that work well enough on streaming playlists while driving your car, but inside the narrative structure of the movie, they act as bludgeons meant to remind you that you are supposed to be having fun right now. The editing cuts between dialogue scenes with a twitchy impatience that makes it hard to register the geography of a room or the rhythm of an argument. Sometimes a reaction shot lingers just a fraction of a second too long on Ranveer's face, turning what should have been a casual smirk into something resembling a grimace. I kept thinking about Imtiaz Ali's Tamasha, which covered adjacent territory about young people fighting against their own instincts and societal expectations, but managed to find actual human pain beneath all the glossy aesthetic choices. That picture trusted its audience to sit with silence for a few seconds. Befikre treats silence like a technical failure that needs to be plugged immediately with a synth-heavy pop beat or a loud declaration about how much these two people love being single in Europe.

The thematic architecture of the film rests entirely on the idea that modern urban romance requires shedding all traditional baggage, which mostly translates to characters saying things like we don't do labels while making out against vintage brick walls. There is an interesting movie buried somewhere beneath the glossy surface about the sheer terror of admitting you actually care about someone after spending years convincing yourself you are too cynical for domesticity. But every time the story approaches a genuine emotional crossroads, the director throws in a flash mob or a muddy rugby match to reset the board back to zero. You see characters going through elaborate rituals of defiance that feel remarkably safe and corporate for a movie that keeps insisting its protagonists are wild and unpredictable. They never really risk anything that matters. Their biggest crisis involves whether they can admit they miss each other after a weekend apart, which lacks the high-stakes friction of what you might find in older bollywood movies that dealt with the slow creep of familial duty and social pressure. The script tries very hard to be modern and European, yet it retains a fundamental conservatism about gender roles that reveals itself whenever the characters have to make a choice about their future. The woman is allowed to be wild only as long as she looks immaculate while doing it, and the man is permitted his commitment phobia only because his charm makes up for his complete lack of emotional maturity.

By the time the mandatory grand reconciliation scene arrives at a crowded railway station—because of course it has to be a railway station—you have watched these two characters break up and make up through so many identical iterations that the emotional math no longer adds up. It is a film that wants to be an anthem for a new generation of romantic cynics, but it lacks the necessary observation of actual human behavior to make the cynicism stick. You leave the theater with your eyes slightly strained from the endless saturation of primary colors and the relentless motion of a camera that refuses to let a single face rest. Hindi movies have a long and glorious history of managing to make melodramatic nonsense feel vital and urgent through sheer force of performance and melody. This one feels more like a mood board put together by a marketing executive who spent three days in Saint-Germain and decided he understood the modern condition. Not great, not bad, just there, taking up two hours of your afternoon before evaporating from your memory the second you step out into the parking lot.