Saiyaara - love makes life live
great loves look ordinary in close-ups. a man holding his wife’s messy hair out of her face on a windy auto ride; a woman smoking a particular cigarette because someone she loved liked it. a boy abandoning his dreams to take care of someone he loves; a girl refusing care to protect the person she loves.
as much as Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara is about the grand gestures seen in bollywood love stories a la Rockstar, it’s also about these moments of common experience — the small acts that breathe life into life.
bollywood romance has been having a hard time as of late, but amongst a pile of mediocrity and disappointment, Saiyaara is a breath of fresh air. the film, true to itself, is a wandering star in a sea of stars.
while Suri’s filmography is not flawless, with his stories often going from too bizarre (Half Girlfriend) to too morose (Hamari Adhuri Kahani), more than a decade after his seminal classic Aashiqui 2, he has once again managed to recapture the essence of love, deliciously drenched in the musicality of heartbreak. the film has successfully brought back the wide eyed sentimentality of young love and the timelessness of self-sacrificial, all-consuming devotion.
the story is as old as it is new. boy (angry young man with aspirations of making it big) meets girl (sheltered young girl with a broken heart). boy desperately staring into tomorrow’s rising sun; girl counting her loss in the stars of the night sky. she looks at him first, but he looks through her first. he helps her then seeks her help. vocally, aggressively and then sensitively. it is a tired trope, so Aashiqui 2 in spirit, you would be blameless to roll your eyes, but Suri builds it up in style only to then gracefully subvert it.
speaking of cliches, this film has them in spades. but what’s refreshing is that they all actually work — the sadboi trope, the vulnerable girl archetype, the unrelenting parents, an alcoholic man grieving his dead wife. in the hands of any other filmmaker, these tropes would stumble and fall like one expects, but Mohit Suri somehow manages this with elegance.
there is little explanation to this except that the creators of this film commit to the severity of first love with absolute unironic sincerity, no winking eyes in sight whatsoever. small acts go a long way. when vaani sits on krish’s bike for the first time, he uses his jacket to tie them both together — a gesture now being memed for its flamboyant machismo, yet in the moment, impossibly romantic. when she gives him a deadline by which she has to reach home, he dutifully abides by it only to hold her hand to cherish the remaining seconds together. to the cynical gaze, these might look excessive, but what are rituals if not a secret language between two souls.
in fact, the two souls leading this tale are truly the backbone of the film. the fiery debate on nepotism might make it hard to remember but once upon a time, newcomers in bollywood were met with curiosity and not immediate outright disdain. the electric performances by Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda have reignited this spark of interest. their chemistry pulses and beats, so palpably alive that one, it seems, would wilt without the other. to Suri’s credit, Vaani, initially written like a woman in service of a man (she fixes him, cheers him on, waits for him), is given the agency of a protagonist. she might be forgetting, but Saiyaara remembers that it is her story.
this, however, does not stop Krish from shining like the burning star he is. Ahaan Panday, shouldered with the impossible task of unending pining, is unbelievably moving. with Krish Kapoor, Panday brings a youthful rage and melds it with a soft sensitivity — a cocktail that, in my jaded mind, shouldn’t work but inarguably does. in several scenes, his eyes brim with tears and the ache is reminiscent of the best moments of Ranbir Kapoor’s performance in 2011’s Rockstar.
his softboy is a welcome addition to the hardened masculinity that a film like this often seems to demand. in fact, this really encapsulates what makes Saiyaara so special: the coming together of Mohit Suri and Aditya Chopra. the central love story of the film vibrates with Suri’s filmography, most of which understands love as a transformational force headed to doom, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 carries the central belief of Chopra’s films that to love someone is to see god in them. one of my favorite scenes is Krish running towards a giant screen with Vaani’s picture and then falling on his knees as if she is the god and temple, the prayer and the hymn.
it tied my heart in a knot. it was not supposed to be so. my cynical eyes avoid films such as Sanam Teri Kasam and Jalebi like the plague, but as the frames of the title track filled the screen, I was transported back to the 13 year old listening to ‘Sunn Raha Hai’ who had never been in love but was so enamored with the concept of love that all the words in the world appeared to be written for me.
the critical reception to this film has been as one would expect from the current Indian landscape in the face of unflinching sincerity. a large number of skeptics have pointed to less than civil shenanigans in single screen theatre screenings to bash the film, but from a place of intimate understanding of where the film’s heart lies, this approach to criticism seems like little more than sheepish cynicism.
great loves look ordinary in close-ups and infeasible from a distance, but in motion, they are poetry suspended between fate and freedom.
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