As the title makes abundantly clear, Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri (which means ‘you’re mine, I’m yours, I’m yours, you’re mine’ in Hindi) is here to have its cake and eat it. Its explicit purpose is to make a 90s-style romance (this means old-fashioned, readers of a certain age!) within 2025 hookup culture, where the central relationship has modern feminism AND old-school chivalry. It is not a perfect movie, with a less-than-ideal setup, but it has such a sunny desperation to please that it’s impossible to dislike.
They meet in an airport bookstore, when Ray (Kartik Aaryan) responds to Rumi’s (Ananya Panday) request for help in moving a Hindi-language romance novel to a more prominent position on the shelves, closer to the Sally Rooneys. Through various twists of fate they end up sharing a cabin together for ‘yacht week’ on the Croatian coast on a boat full of couples. Ray is the beloved only child of a wealthy wedding planner, Pinky (Neena Gupta having a great time), lives and works with her in Los Angeles, has such a great body he can make jokes about it being photoshopped, and has come to Croatia thanks to Game of Thrones. For her part Rumi is of course the author of that romance novel, taking a solo break away from her unwell widower father the Colonel (Jackie Shroff). She lives with him and her sister Jia (Chandni Bhabhda) in Agra, with a view of the Taj Mahal from the terrace, though not happily. The news during the trip that Jia has gotten engaged to a Canadian she met on Tinder deeply upsets Rumi. She doesn’t want to be her father’s main caretaker, but the Colonel is not well enough to live on his own, and he absolutely refuses to consider moving to Jia with Canada. Brides always move in with the husband’s family you see.
So when, after various other twists Ray and Rumi do fall in love, there’s a big problem. Rumi just can’t leave her father behind to move to Los Angeles, and Ray supports his mother’s ambitions so much he just can’t ask her if a permanent return to India might be possible. There’s nothing for it but split up – until Ray remembers there’s a wedding to plan! So he returns to India after all, to manage Jia’s wedding and woo not Rumi but the Colonel, to get him to agree to move to Los Angeles and everyone can be married hooray! But of course things are never so simple.
It’s quite refreshing to see an Indian movie be explicit that the leads are having lots of sex. It’s equally pleasant, when the Colonel catches his daughters upchuck drunk at Jia’s engagement party, his reaction is disgust at how bad they are at holding their liquor. Pinky even drops the first F-bomb I’ve ever heard in an Indian movie (although this is a little like someone expressing surprise that America has made movies that aren’t superhero films in the past few years). There are even jokes about ChatGPT, which Ray wishes the writers of Stranger Things had used so the kids wouldn’t be so old in the final series. The point about how modern and global-conscious and sophisticated everyone is here is very thoroughly made. But the solution to their problems, which seems blindingly obvious to someone from outside Indian culture, takes forever to be figured out. Writer Karan Shrikant Sharma could have sped things up a bit.
Ms. Panday is a winning and cheerful presence, who makes clear how much Rumi values her freedom and career while meeting the silly needs of the plot. Mr. Aaryan handles the trickier role very well – if he was arrogant with his privileges or nauseating as a mama’s-boy, the whole movie would collapse at that first scene in the airport – in making us feel the modern playboy’s shock at falling hook-line-and-sinker. Watching Rumi and Ray negotiate their different pre-existing ideas with each other is quite sweet actually, as everyone tries to figure out how to keep everyone else happy, often while drunk. The musical numbers are largely to show off a huge number of costumes, and the obvious product placement (including for Tinder, funnily enough) isn’t too overbearing.
And yet director Sameer Vidwans should not have forced such an old-fashioned framework onto a modern long-distance relationship. Survival under global capitalism can be just as tough on love as the patriarchy ever was, and watching Ray and Rumi try to stay connected while thousands of miles apart could have been interesting indeed. But then there would have been less of the pretty people flirting in gorgeous, sunny scenery together, and when the skies outside are this dark, that would have been a loss indeed. And of course we all know things are going to work out for the best: Ray not only reads Rumi’s book, he likes it. For a writer, there’s no greater act of love.
Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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