Can you tell this is a foreign title? It's one of the most off-putting I've read since the Barf detergent brand. But as the exclamation point suggests, this is partly a comedy, so the distaste may be deliberate.
The protagonist (Ranbir Kapoor) is officially named Murphy, but since he's always been deaf, he can't speak well, hence the nickname. Raised only by his impoverished father, Jung (Akash Khurana), he has had little discipline and keeps getting in trouble with the police, particularly Inspector Dutta (Saurabh Shukla). He and the beautiful Shruti (Ileana D'Cruz) fall for each other, but her parents disapprove and she sticks with a preexisting engagement, only to find him popping up in her life again and again. When Jung needs expensive medical care, he hopes to collect a ransom on his wealthy childhood friend, Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra), who has autism and a crush on him.
We get no subtitles for Barfi's sign language. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be nonstandard, tho an associate can translate it. The spoken words of other characters tend to mix languages, and unlike in some Indian movies, the English parts aren't always subtitled, but you probably won't miss anything important.
At his best, Barfi is sensitive yet a grade A clown, worthy of old-school classic cinema if he didn't lift a lot from it directly. I wasn't surprised to glimpse a Charlie Chaplin cutout for a split second. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether he's being funny on purpose or just clumsy. He's not a dim bulb; he gets the gist of dialog from reading lips and can be quite resourceful.
At his worst, Barfi is mean to innocent people and hardly amusing about it. I can accept when he commits misdemeanors seemingly by accident and felonies in desperation, but pranking someone before begging for money and again after they give it doesn't sit well with me. Neither does destroying street lamps for a social test. He even swipes candy from a child, hangs around to watch the kid cry, and doesn't care who notices. So much for one character's claim that he was sweet to everybody and wanted nothing in return. Further research tells me that the filmmakers took some inspiration from The Notebook, whose male lead I always found nigh intolerable.
I'm less sure how to feel about Barfi and Jhilmil. She doesn't talk much more often or articulately than he does, and she acts so childlike that I could hardly imagine loving her in a nonpaternal way. Yet Barfi comes to prefer her to Shruti, who has done far more to help him (about half her interactions that we see involve getting him out of jail). This does not stop him from repeatedly raising his hand as if to hit Jhilmil, inducing her to recoil every time.
Eh, I shouldn't expect a Tollywood (not Bollywood) picture set mainly in '70s Darjeeling to depict western values in play. Not only was the setting harsh for autistic youth, but the police didn't need much of a reason to beat up an already arrested man where visitors could see. Barfi does come out looking better than some jerks.
At 151 minutes, Barfi! is relatively short for an Indian hit. I just wish it weren't so short on agreeable morals.
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