Hum Tum, the Hindi words for “you & I”, is a Bollywood Indian film that first aired in 2004. It is the story of a man, Karan, and a young woman, Rhea. They meet on a flight from India to New York. During the course of their flight they have a six hour layover in Amsterdam. During this time Karan falls in love with Rhea and spends the next seven years trying to keep up with her as she lives her life. Karan is a cartoonist who creates the characters Hum and Tum, and their adventures are based on his experiences with Rhea.
The most notable thing about this film is the character development. At first, you believe that Rhea is the one that changes the most through the course of the film. She is in college, gets married, starts her own business, and becomes widowed. Karan seems to be more stagnant, living with his mother well into adulthood and goofing around. However, as the film develops you see that each character changes in subtle ways that makes you truly believe that you’re seeing them over the course of many years. Rhea starts out as stubborn and independent. Karan starts out as disrespectful and flippant. While they retain these qualities in some measure you also see them grow up. Rhea starts to realize that it’s okay to accept help from others. Karan begins to feel the need to help Rhea as she mourns her husband.
Overall, I would give this film 4 stars. There are two dominant reasons for this. The first, at 2.5 hours long this film is long by U.S. standards. The second, this is a typical Bollywood film with singing, dancing, and bright colors. The problem is that it’s very obvious that the characters are not doing their own singing. The lip syncing is off, which is very distracting from the otherwise superb musical numbers.
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