Aryan Agnihotri is a top robotics expert in Mumbai. He feels under pressure from his family to get married but no woman or even maid ever meets his very picky needs. He travels to Miami to meet his aunt Urmila who heads an IT company there. She leaves Aryan in her home while she goes away on business. Also staying there is her maid Sifra. Aryan connects with Sifra who seems attuned to his needs and they go out. This turns to romance and they spend the night together. Urmila returns to reveal that Sifra is a lifelike android and that this was a test to see if she could fool Aryan. Aryan returns to India upset but cannot stop thinking about Sifra. He persuades Urmila that Sifra’s biggest test would be fooling a traditional Indian family that she is real. He brings Sifra back to India to meet his family, introducing her as his girlfriend. In between trying to hide Sifra’s robotic nature from them, Aryan then surprises everybody by announcing that he and Sifra are getting married.
Bollywood cinema – the cinema of Western India (films made in Hindi, centred around Mumbai) is one of the largest non-Hollywood film producing niches in the world. Bollywood produces numerous dramas and police thrillers and especially romances. Everyone is familiar with the clichés of Bollywood with its inclusion of singing and dancing numbers in most of their films. Genre cinema from Bollywood is a rarer beast, although there are a growing number of horror films – I have a listing of these here at Bollywood Cinema.
Bollywood rarely touches science-fiction subjects – there has been the odd effort such as Mr India (1987), Koi … Mil Gaya (2003) and sequels, Action Replayy (2010) and the surprisingly thoughtful alien visitor satire PK (2014). Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya comes out riding the wave of androids and A.I. themes that has become incredibly popular in Hollywood treatments since the mid-2010s with the likes of Her (2013), Ex Machina (2015) and The Creator (2023), among others. Bollywood had previously ventured into the subject with Endhiran/The Robot (2010). (See Androids and Artificial Intelligence).
Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya, which translates to English as I Got So Entangled in Your Words, is essentially a Romantic Comedy version of one of these android films. It is a film that plays out by romantic comedy beats – the lovers separated by an upset, their trying to keep a secret from the family – but where one of them just happens to be an android. (All that seems is missing from the formula is the romantic rival).
Shahid Kapoor with android girl Sifra (Kriti Sanon)
Of course, being a Bollywood film, much of the romantic comedy is just as much centred around Shahid Kapoor having to find the right marriage partner and for android girl Sifra to win the approval of his traditional Indian family. (It would be difficult to imagine the same film playing out in a US setting, for example). Almost the whole second half of the film consists of comedy routines based around Shahid Kapoor trying to keep Sifra’s mechanical nature hidden from his family or her habit of making literal interpretations. The tone of the film throughout is lightweight and often gets very silly.
When it comes to the singing and dancing that you expect of a Bollywood film – of which there are only a couple of numbers, plus ones over the end credits – the film starts to open up. The montage scenes of Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon come with a certain sensuality. It is also noted that Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya, being made for Amazon Prime, comes without the usual Indian censorship of the depiction of kissing and we even see the couple in bed together (albeit still PG-rated by US standards).
(Thank you to Prateeti Bhattacharya for providing the copy of this film)
