Despite its best intentions, it is a tedious exercise going through this film. Sara Loren is pretty, but her performance isn’t. The director and writer still probably think we’re stuck in the 60s and 70s. We know it’s stupid to make sweeping statements like “all bar girls are prostitutes” (because it isn’t true), but why does one need to make a film to elucidate that point?

Director Shadaab Mirza reinvents the premise in the dance bars, giving us an insight as how these bars were maligned by politicians with vested interests. Mirza seems to be confident that he is making an epic romance but actually he is picking nuts and bolts from classics to create a unit of clichés with lots of wood work.

Invariably, Hindi cinema’s depiction of bar dancers is straightforward: trash-talking roadies by night, virginal white-salwaar angels by day. There is such a vast difference between these two avatars that it becomes more difficult to digest than Puneet Issar playing a respected lawyer.

The film looks good, is short on runtime and harbors on old-fashioned hysterics. Likeable but not exactly enjoyable!

…barring cinematography and music, other aspects of the film are way too mediocre and cliched for your liking. Sadly it’s 2015 and this formulaic drama has nothing new to offer.

Overwrought and laboured, the idea to reignite a good old flame fails lacks both passion and pain.

Maybe the intention of the film was to tell us that ladies who dance for a living also have the right to respectability, which is wonderful, but a mothballed plot and an even more mothballed treatment isn’t the way forward.

The only saving grace of the film is its cinematography (Mujahid Raza). The film could have come across as a decent affair if its editing (Mayuresh Sawant) was at least average.

On the whole, BARKHAA can be avoided as it offers nothing new.

Barkhaa rains down a rhapsody of drama and romance. A heartwarming at times touching tale of an innocent girl’s journey into the world of deceit, compromise and corruption, it echoes Raj Kapoor’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Kamal Anrohi’sPakeezah in the way the respectable genteel upper class is shown to exploit women of meager means.

Sara Loren is no Meena Kumari. But she kills the part much better than Mandakiniin Raj Kapoor’s fevered fable.