Raj Kanwar decided that what Hindi cinema needed in the summer of 2002 was a reincarnation plot crossed with a musical about the freedom struggle, and if I am honest, that felt like a stretch even before buying the ticket. The sound mixing in the opening reel is loud enough to rattle your teeth. We open on a car chase that looks suspiciously sped up in post-production, which immediately sets a clumsy baseline for all the pyrotechnics to follow. Raj Kanwar had just come off a string of glossy melodramas where the weather always matched the emotional state of the characters, but here the weather just looks like standard-issue Mumbai heat mixed with fake fog. There is a weird edit right around the ten-minute mark where a supporting actor’s dialogue doesn't quite sync with the movement of his jaw, and it bugged me for the rest of the scene.

Arya Babbar steps into the frame with the heavy burden of being Raj Babbar’s son, which must have felt like carrying a boulder up a steep hill in wet shoes. He plays dual roles, ancient and modern, and he handles the transition from sword-wielding revolutionary to a modern guy who wears frosted tips with roughly the same facial expression. Amrita Rao, on the other hand, arrived with that peculiar vulnerability that made her look like she was about to cry even when she was just standing in a field smiling. She has a scene near a lake where she is supposed to look ethereal and timeless, but the wind machine is blowing her dupatta straight into her face and she has to casually swipe it away while maintaining deep romantic eye contact. That small flub stayed in the final cut. Ashutosh Rana chews the scenery with such ferocity that you almost worry about his jaw health. He plays the villain with a low, rumbling growl that he musters from the absolute bottom of his stomach, pacing around pillars and barking orders with a vein bulging on his forehead that deserves its own billing in the credits. He is giving you full-throttle villainy from 1999 while the rest of the movie is trying to figure out how to look like the new millennium. You watch him dominate the frame and you wonder why anyone thought the reincarnation angle was even necessary when they could have just let him chase the leads around for two and a half hours.

The screenplay by Praveen Bhardwaj feels like it was written on the back of several napkins during a turbulent flight from Chandigarh to Delhi. Characters explain their motivations out loud to empty rooms just so the audience in the cheap seats doesn't get confused about who loved who in 1942. We get flashbacks inside of flashbacks, complete with sepia tones that look like an early digital filter downloaded off a sketchy website. It resembles nothing so much as Subhash Ghai’s Pardes minus the budget and the international locations, trading Grand Canyon vistas for dusty studio floors painted to look like a Punjabi village square. The music by Anu Malik relies on a flute motif that repeats itself every four minutes until you want to scream at the speakers. Every time Amrita Rao walks across a courtyard, that same breathy flute kicks in. It’s a minor thing, but when a melody gets recycled that often, you start counting the seconds between appearances instead of listening to the lyrics.

Cinematographer Santosh Thundiyil points his lens at everything with a relentless, glossy polish that makes even a mud hut look like it was sprayed with industrial lacquer. The camera loves to circle the two leads when they embrace, spinning so fast you might need a motion sickness pill. There are drone shots of fields that look pretty enough on a television screen, but on the big screen they reveal the artificiality of the sets. You can see where the painted backdrop meets the physical dirt. Hindi movies have always relied on this kind of artifice, of course, but usually there is enough star power to make you ignore the cardboard trees. Here, the artifice just sits there, begging you to notice how much glue went into holding the set together.

There is a specific kind of earnestness running through Bollywood movies from this era that makes it hard to be completely mean to them, even when the dialogue sounds like bad greeting card poetry. The characters talk about patriotism and eternal love as if those are the only two subjects worth discussing over breakfast. They never just have a normal conversation. Every exchange is loaded with destiny and ancestral curses. When the hero declares that his love survived across centuries, Arya Babbar delivers the line with his chin tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle, staring into a light reflector just off camera. It is a posture learned in acting school rather than discovered in life. Yet there is something almost charming about how hard everyone is trying. You can sense forty people standing just outside the frame holding reflectors, sweating in polyester costumes, praying that the public will show up on Friday.

The pacing collapses completely in the second half, right around the time the reincarnation plot demands that characters from the past start recognizing each other by the shape of their ears or the way they hold a teacup. Logic takes a permanent vacation. People travel between continents on a whim just to deliver a dramatic stare. The supporting cast includes a bunch of veteran actors who look like they are checking their watches in their heads, wondering how many days of shooting they have left before they collect their checks. One particular uncle actor spends three entire scenes holding a ledger and looking worried about land ownership, and you never find out what happens to his land. He just vanishes from the movie when the action shifts back to the modern timeline. It’s a messy construction, held together by sheer stubbornness and Anu Malik’s brass section.

When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having watched an artifact from a transitional phase in the industry. The studios were panicking about changing audience tastes, trying to blend the earthy melodrama of the nineties with the sleek, urban styling of the new decade, and the seams were coming apart everywhere. It is not a disaster on the scale of some truly legendary flops, nor is it a forgotten treasure waiting to be rediscovered by film scholars. It simply exists on a shelf, occupying space, remembered mostly by people who happened to catch it on cable television on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Amrita Rao would go on to do much better work where her natural shyness was used as an asset rather than an obstacle, and Arya Babbar would find his niche elsewhere, leaving this particular experiment as a strange, lopsided monument to a year when everyone involved tried to bend time and space with an inadequate budget.