…a cinematic kaleidoscope full of diverse genres, styles, and cast that all come together to fit perfectly and form a colorful film full of expression.

Experiments are good. Hindi cinema certainly has room for more. But you run the risk of things blowing up in your face. That’s what this one does.

Although it feels aimless and self-indulgent throughout the first half, X: Past Is Present finds some purpose towards the end. However, you’ll have to be exceedingly forgiving to sit through the first half waiting for the movie to find itself later on.

X Past is Present is an experiment at best and should be watched as one; if at all!

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.

…a movie like this sure would have looked good on paper, but its execution just doesn’t work well with the viewers. Too many cooks do spoil the broth, we say.

Go for the film only if you want to watch a film with a different and striking storyline or if you don’t have anything better to do this weekend and just want to kill some idle time. But dont expect yourself to get entertained, because as already mentioned earlier, you might just start thinking that you were better off back home.

Avoid, X : Past is Present. It will fail to suit your filmi palettes and make you stay away from biryani for life with a very grotesque reference. You can do without such negativity.

What it does tear open is the question of how ethical it is for film reviewers, who are in the business of commenting on other people’s films, have the power to influence opinion about films, to occasionally cross over to the other side. There is no ban on film reviewers/critics becoming filmmakers. But let us not for a second pretend that to get these assignments their clout, access as film critics was not in play. Often there are no rules. Often it is a personal standard of ethic that we all set for ourselves. These men, sadly, set them low.

The film may be called X: Past is Present, but it surely promises a headache in the immediate future.

If the film weren’t directed by 11 directors and written by even more people, it would come across as autobiographical. This is as much a compliment to the directors as it is to the editor. Dissecting the film director-wise or story-wise would be grave injustice to how smoothly it has all fallen in place.

Overall, this movie is like a biryani prepared by 11 cooks. You can imagine the taste if one cook has forgotten to inform the other whether he has added salt!

X Past Is Present is an audacious experimental film that left me craving for more. And I am not too sure if I mean that in a good way.

Consistency is sorely missing, thanks to different cinematographers and their styles. While it is a strain to train your eyes to adjust to various lightings, it is also an effort to switch from one style of narration to another as it veers from sublime to batshit crazy to downright tacky in the course of just 100-plus minutes. Unfortunately and unnecessarily, one thing that is more or less consistent is the camera’s obsession with lurking in and out of the assets of the women involved.

In its misappropriation of Freudian themes, the movie gives its protagonist a truckload of guilt, but nothing more to chew on. And all this, means that the grand statement made isn’t anything more than a South Mumbai kid’s version of the all-conquering, all-observing, all-knowing feminine power.

There’s a lot of worship for women that’s comes through in X. But is there enough love?

Except for one segment, right at the end, which has Swara Bhaskar and the young Jha, and a sense of time and place, the rest have practically no weight, nor heft. They just go past in a blur, without any real markers. The lines sound forced, and Kapoor says them without investing anything in his character.

Perhaps there’ll be those who’ll find something resonant in X, who might be moved to try and figure out the time-travel business teased towards the end. Personally, I doubt I would have thought less or more of the film if K and his friend had come across the DeLorean, travelled back to the start of the film and begun their conversation again. I wouldn’t stick around for the rerun, though. If past is present, my time is all the more precious.

Skip the movie if abstract scares you, for this will not only scare but also confuse. But do watch it if the intricacies of human mind and relationships intrigue you. Must watch for those interested in the art of filmmaking or storytelling too.

Considering how ambitious the intention is, in attempting to diversify the film into various genres and interpretations of love, it is commendable that the present life of K is well tied up with all the other stories set in the past. It just about makes it a watchable, cohesive whole, though not necessarily something that makes sense.

11 filmmakers contributing to a single theme in ‘X Past is Present’ make one big mess…

X: Past Is Present has its share of dull, grey patches, heightened by the hollow philosophy on life and art that K spouts in his weaker moments. But these are few and far between.

From the heady to the humdrum, the film drifts much like the protagonist himself, but, like him again, makes it to a reasonably meaningful destination.

…simply something that will not connect at all with the non-pseudos who form 98 percent of the audiences for Hindi cinema. The film is also partly in Tamil and predominantly in English. And at 105 minutes, clearly more than a quarter of it is sleep-inducing!

…tries too hard at being modern-day filmmaking but in the lieu forgets audience’s commercial tastes. In one of the dialogues, K says that he does not believe in God but in Science. Well, God, Science and Filmmaking, all three seem to be a lost cause here.

Watching X: Past is Present is like being in a trance or a dream. Some moments remain vivid even after the film gets over, others way too hazy to recollect. There is a big idea here, which gets communicated to the viewer at times and eludes at others. The film moves from moments of instant connect to those which demand that the viewer see things from a distance.