Hamare Baarah Review: Loud and jarring!

HAMARE BAARAH

Producers- Ravi. S. Gupta, Birender Bhagat, Sanjay Nagpal and Sheo Balak Singh

Director- Kamal Chandra

Cast- Annu Kapoor, Ishlin Prasad, Paritosh Tripathi, Aditi Bhatpahri, Manoj Joshii, Ashwini Kalsekar, Rahul Bagga and Parth Samthan

Platform of Release- Theatres

Rating:

By Jyothi Venkatesh

Humare Baarah, based on a controversial subject, is set in a Muslim household from Lucknow. It questions the belief of having many children in the name of Allah. The film revolves around a bold young middle class woman who sets out to go to court against her own father Khan Saahab (Annu Kapoor), who ekes out his livelihood by signing in order to help her stepmother terminate a very risky pregnancy that could be fatal. Will justice be served finally forms the crux of the story.

Khan Sahab (Annu Kapoor) is a 60-year-old devout and strict disciplinarian Muslim with extreme views about the way women and children in his household should lead their life. He has married multiple times and has fathered as many as eleven children with a twelfth one on its way. However, this pregnancy is extremely risky and can even cost his young wife Rukshar (Ishlin Prasad) her life.

Khan Sahab does not consider this as a risk worth considering because he is of the opinion that children are God’s blessings and aborting a child under any circumstance is very unholy. With the exception of his older son Shahnawaz (Paritosh Tripathi), his entire family is against Khan Sahab’s authoritarian ways, but sadly none of them have the courage to stand up against him.

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Hell sorry Dozakh breaks out one day, when one of his daughters, Alfia (Aditi Bhatpahri) musters the courage to approach a woman lawyer Afreen (Ashwini Kalsekar) to get a court order to let Rukshar abort the unborn child.

To sum up, I’d say that ‘Hamare Baarah’ sets out to ambitiously tackle a variety of societal issues that are thought-provoking. While its core theme centres on women’s empowerment and challenges toxic male patriarchy, the unduly long and jarring film often veers into a narrative that feels more like forced advocacy than entertainment.

As far as performances are concerned, Annu Kapoor is excellent as the orthodox strict father though at times he does seem far too loud while Paritosh scores as his son. Manoj Joshi comes across more like a loud caricature without much realism. The love story between Alfia and journalist Danish (Parth Samthan) looks too forced and what’s more half-baked.

The film sets out to showcase the grave but sad case that scores of women in our country are still victims of domestic abuse and skewed mind-sets of monsters parading as men under the garb of religion.