Most Bollywood films are accused of being mind numbing. Brainless and devoid of sense, they attract much of our ire and rightfully so, but sometimes things take a turn for the worse. Every once in a while there appears a film gift wrapped in its own smug air of eccentric madness, dripping with pretentious profundity and pseudo-intellectuality. X: Past is Present is just that.
The film tries to tell the story of a filmmaker, K, played by Rajat Kapoor in the present and his younger self is played by Anshuman Jha. How much Fair and Handsome was applied to turn an Anshuman into a Rajat Kapoor is, well, anyone’s guess! When not distracted by this existentialist concern, we are prodded on to focus upon K’s encounter with 11 women at various stages in his life. For this, the film has as many directors as there are players in a cricket team. How nice would it be had they chosen to play the game of cricket instead? But that wasn’t to be and so we have Abhinav Shiv Tiwari, Anu Menon, Hemant Gaba, Nalan Kumarasamy, Pritam D. Gupta, Q, Raja Sen, Rajshree Ojha, Sandeep Mohan, Sudhish Kamath and Suparn Verma, who must all share the blame for the disaster that has been manufactured.
This labyrinth of a story passes us by in a blur that we would prefer to forget than to engage with. A common thread running through the stories is a wrist watch which, ironically, is symbolic of the time that we waste trying to deal with this abstruse piece. The psychedelic shots, shaky camera work, and a forced open-ended story, scream pretentious and there are more questions here than answers, but we frankly don’t care. The story never really holds our attention.
The cast has some big names, such as Rajat Kapoor, Swara Bhaskar, Huma Qureishi and Radhika Apte. Chances are that some unsuspecting people can fall prey to their lure, but my job here is to tell you to beware. Keep a safe distance, for I give it ZERO QUINTS OUT OF 5.
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