Playtime: "Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!"

We rejoin Bollywood in much the same position as Hollywood eighteen months ago, having to reissue established titles to fill a gap while the industry sorts itself out. The situation is pretty dire, all told: despite a raft of new releases in the first month-and-a-half of 2025, not one has broken into the UK Top 10, and on the list of the lowest ten opening weekends of the year so far, fully seven spots are occupied by Indian films. (The audience that abandoned the multiplex for the sofa and streaming services during lockdown isn't coming back in any hurry.) For Valentine's Day, we're getting 1994's Hum Aapke Hain Koun...!, as savvy a choice of revival as any. Headed up by two major stars in their pomp, this studio-bound fairytale from writer-director Sooraj Barjatya was a runaway hit upon its first run, opening in the interval between Jurassic Park and Titanic and doing almost as much business as either. (I have a vivid memory of seeing the title in local cinema listings week in week out for months, without ever really knowing what it was.) Clearly, distributors are relying on the nostalgia factor, treating the audience as errant children who need to be tempted outside with the colour, songs and light fun the industry appears to have forsaken in putting today's stars in drab military khaki and having them repeatedly pledge fealty to a flag.

By contrast to those frowningly serious undertakings, the opening stretch of Barjatya's film - and, indeed, much of what follows - has the look of Saturday morning kids' TV. A jovial cricket match, overseen by a dog in an umpire's chair (meet Tuffy, played by an Indian Spitz called Redo, who somehow negotiated a full-screen opening credit for himself); twentysomething performers, playing far, far younger; a woman in a sweatshirt bearing the legend "BUM CHUMS", which is certainly a choice, if not perhaps a label that could take off outside India. A sort-of plot emerges. Two brothers from one family, two sisters from another, all under the thumb of parents pairing them up, if not necessarily with the urgency Salman Khan's Prem and Madhuri Dixit's Nisha would prefer. Predominantly, however, Barjatya sets these characters to gameplaying: the cricket is followed by snooker, pass the parcel (or toss the pillow), hide the shoes, lots and lots of Tuffy ("he never bites, he only loves") doing tricks on his hindlegs, riddles (of which that title - translated as Who Am I to You? - is one, solved in the final seconds), friendship and loyalty tests, and even some kind of kd lang-ish drag act in the queer-coded musical number "Didi Tera Devar Deewana". Its appeal in 2025 is pure escapism. HAHK might well have seemed unlike anything else in cinema in 1994 - lest we forget, the year of Speed, Sátántangó and Through the Olive Trees - clinging as it did to the same devotional songs Hindi films had been singing for a half-century or more and broad comedy interludes (a salt/sugar mix-up; Tuffy supping from a bottle of Thums Up; a baby peeing on someone's dress) intended to tickle all corners of the family unit. An hour in, with a lot of this business going on and no immediate sign of a story developing, you realise the film has had to be made behind closed studio doors - much as, say, Meet Me in St. Louis was - to detach its action almost completely from the rigours and demands (not to mention the gravity) of reality.

HAHK is one of those rare films where its most passionate fans and most vocal detractors agree entirely on what it is (childish); what matters is whether you mind that it takes place in cloud cuckoo land, or that the final-act complication could have been prevented by the simple installation of a stairguard. (It's what happens when the fully grown adults in a movie are set to behaving like toddlers.) The worst I'm prepared to say about Barjatya's film is that its Quality Street aesthetic now looks like a basic version of what Sanjay Leela Bhansali was just beginning to layer up and finesse, by toning down the dayglo greens and pinks and introducing darker shades to the dramatic palette. Like the Cadbury's products the sweet-toothed Nisha can be sporadically seen munching on, this is a confection, working from a story that often seems to have been made up by sugar-giddied youngsters: two hours of mucking about and dressing up, followed by a gabbled hour of conflict premised on the idea that Prem and Nisha are obvious, ready playmates. That innocence continues to beguile, nevertheless. Here's a reminder of a time when Salman, latterly a gruffly adenoidal action figure, was but a goofy prince prepared to sing "it's my first love/It's the first time"; when Mads, introduced on rollerskates (!), was the dancing queen of Bollywood; and when Hindi film was still in fond conversation with its inner child, rather than handing him a rifle and packing him off to cadet college. Getting folks back into cinemas - regaining the audience's trust - may well require such baby steps.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! returns to selected cinemas from Friday.