Dobara Phir Se arrives like a magic spell. Mehreen Jabbar makes the rabbit appear out of the hat by telling a very powerful story in an equally simple fashion. But pulling out a rabbit from a hat is a trick you are likely not to come to see again. DPS is good but it’s a one-time watch. I strongly believe that a good film is one that you would pay to watch again, but in the case of DPS, we’ll have to make an exception. It’s a film that doesn’t target the regular local cinema-going audience but still manages to succeed at what Ho Mann Jahan failed to do: define the ‘Pakistani urban cool’ in its true essence. Some will love it and others won’t bother watching.
The events of Dobara Phir Se follow this rather predictable pattern, and by the end of it, it's fairly easy to summarise the film in a line or two. But doing so is dismissing all the little twists in the tale that are so well woven in the story that they don't really call attention to themselves.
When Hammad (Adeel) and Zainab (Hareem) meet at a party at their friends Saman and Vasay's (Sanam Saeed and Ali Kazmi) house, Zainab is unhappily married to Asim (Shaz Khan). By the end of the party, Hammad's taken Natasha's (Tooba Siddiqui) number and the two start dating. Eventually, Zainab becomes available and Natasha gets dumped. So begins the film's core romance. We see Hammad and Zainab get together, fall apart and overcome a series of obstacles to get together again.
The events of Dobara Phir Se follow this rather predictable pattern, and by the end of it, it's fairly easy to summarise the film in a line or two. But doing so is dismissing all the little twists in the tale that are so well woven in the story that they don't really call attention to themselves.
DPS is a film that tugged at the heart. While cheap comedy, melodrama and exaggeration have been a few of cinema’s long standing appeals, it is liberating and at the same time encouraging to see Mehreen using simple tools to tell her story. She zooms into the lives of a close knit group of friends living in New York and that ‘love for realism’ has been her forte. Mehreen is not a director who would succumb to commercialism by compromising on her style of story telling and we’re grateful for that.
In a nutshell Mehreen Jabbar’s film is remarkable and she has just raised the standard for others a tad bit higher. As the story unfolds, all characters learn that happiness should be the center of one’s life. The heart has to be content with life, career, spouse or any choice that you make in life. If it is not, then press the restart button. Hence, Dobara Phir Se.

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