Saiyaara, directed by Mohit Suri, premiered in theatres on 18 th July and features Aneet Padda, Ahaan Panday, Varun Badola and Geeta Agrawal.
Saiyaara is the sort of film that plays its heart on its sleeves. It is overwhelmingly indebted to the appeal of retro romance, but has no qualms with throwing sprinkles of modern reality, digital journalism, waning focus, and music as instant gratification. It is that way the familiarity is soothing. The darkness of Mohit Suri beats heavily too no less– the heartache, the dramatics, the emotional scenes.
More old-style heart and modern touch
And though the experiences covered in the story are not novel, the honesty with which it is said counts. The movie has no intention of shocking or re-creating anything, it just wants to bring back a memory of what falling and staying in love is like. This is sometimes sufficient. You are not exactly driven to the edge of your seat here, but instead, you are caressed with the reminding of how tender and all-absorbing love used to be.
A love that Found thee twice
It has a straight-forward, almost a predictable story line, yet it is passionately told. Krish Kapoor (Ahaan Panday) is a bad tempered raw-talented singer who encounters a tearful journalist, Vaani Batra (Aneet Padda). They start out badly together, with him feeling offended by a review, and her not amused by his tantrum. However, the sparks are stirred up way too early. Their sexual chemistry sizzles and the screenplay keeps the pacing hot.
This is when the film takes a different turn after Vaani is diagnosed with Alzheimer, though with early-onset, which is not shocking at all. Krish also drops off his dreams to take care of her, and this is the value which seems to be scarce and idyllic today. And to complete the already exhaustively gratifying story, Vaani goes missing. The plot does not attempt to do much explaining, and this can be admittedly good. It allows silence, staring and recollections to speak up.
Krish and Vaani are in love and yet, it does not seem out of place anywhere-it only builds on you just like a song that you often listen to in the background.
One new start, Two new makes
A lot of the emotive content in the film is pegged on its young cast stars Ahaan Pandey and Aneet Padda and they do it in style. Ahaan is unpolished and yet assertive particularly when it is an emotionally laden scene. He is convincing as a person who has to choose between fame and love. Aneet however, is quite collected. She can restrain herself as Vaani and does not overdo the weakness.
They collectively create an undemanding chemistry on screen, the one that does not require raging proclamations. You cheer them not because the storyline is saying to do so, but because their eyes are. That is a great feat in the case of newcomers. There is a sense of quiet maturity in which they embrace ups and downs of their characters. In a movie that is more of an emotional movie than a plot movie, their performance thus makes it the hand that keeps the movie in place.
An old song, but with a few discords
The movie has a great deal of or plagiarism of the Aashiqui formula- angst-filled song and dance, and music that heals and lovers who discover themselves in separation. Occasionally it can get too convenient or rather sentimental. The subplot that sees Vaani appearing in a woman ashram in Manali is a half-baked subplot. One can hardly believe that that career-minded woman would just disappear and begin leading the life of a Mahila Ashram in Manali, when even with her Alzheimer, she hangs newspaper clippings of Krish in her room.
Krish, likewise, has an emotional journey where he reconciles with his absentee father (Varun Badola does a very sincere job) and that too in flashback mode, which begins too hurriedly. There can be a little bit more episodes that would bond them. The music is relaxed; however, it does not sound like a true chartbuster. But it was a warmth there lingers at. The film never comes out empty in a place where the screenplay blunders. It nevertheless pulls at the heart strings.
And when it came to the topic of his ability to recognise aspirational sadboi soundtracks, director Mohit Suri was correct in his guess that people actually remember the songs of his film more than the films. Being mainstream Bollywood is a skill, obviously, in a time when Hindi movie music is becoming extinct as a writing and story-development mechanism.
However this has been the case with Suri when it comes to his own films; Zeher (2005), Awarapan (2007), Woh Lamhe (2006), Malang (2020), Hamari Adhuri Kahani (2015) and above all ek villian (2014); each one had its own share of addicting music albums that at the end of the movie you felt that the films fancies till date are the narration that seems to be justifying its own time and space between the songs. It did not get the recollection through its tunes, but that lilting A Star Is Born adaptation, Aashiqui 2 (2013) got closest to being recalled not because of it.
This is why, perhaps, the far most effective film so far of Saiyaara Mohit Suri is grounded on the basis of the sensory correlation between memory and music. Either cannot be separated with the other. It is a disease (A cinematically staged disease, Alzheimer) that is making itself felt between an intense songwriter (Aneet Padda, as Vaani Batra) and an intense singer (Ahaan Panday, as Krish Kapoor), both of whom are entrenched towards each other.
The formula is not new: it is a case of Imtiaz Ali Rockstar (2011) meets A Moment to Remember (2004) or a case of Aashiqui 2 meets The Notebook (2004). However it is new in the context. In writer Sankalp Sadanah, Suri succeeds in reminding us our connection to his filmography an occupation that we can look with the help of two young people hanging on words and music to keep their plot going. Saiyaara in 156 minutes brings back the make-heartbreak-great-again genre of mopey love: all those single-screen emotions packaging in the multiplex form.
It is a genre we have nearly lost in this new-age flood of hypermasculine imitations, re-makes and derivative romcoms. Fortune knows we have been in need of the old-style tearjerker.
Script Analysis- Saiyaara Movie Review
The story and screenplay of Sankalp Sadanah is tactless and unreasonable. Logically, riddled with loopholes as any such story ought to be we are chewed on with syrupy, sentimental, unnatural emotions. Nevertheless despite all its flaws this is another example of a schizophrenic movie what with the first part being extremely well executed and the livelier scenes and the second part appearing as a dissociate movie completely (the fishy events perhaps considering the premise!). Some of the bad versions of such films that I have seen off the top of my head are Kyun?…Ho Gaya Na (2004) and Shirin Farhad Ki To Nikal Padi (2013). What I am saying?
A heavy subject like Alzheimer is made very comfortable in the script, as compared to the piazza but much delicate U Me Aur Hum in 2008. Vaani remembers at script-wise opportune moments, and forgets as expeditiously. The climax is overlong and preposterous and the ending as roomy. The conversations were either cliched, wannabe-cult and realistic.
The script has to engage in a couple of awkward things, such as the reintroduction of evil ex-boyfriend to Vaani to make whole issue of her disease a more dramatic one, but this does more on a macro-level. The licence taken so as to portray the condition is this time well deserved owing to the manner in which the concept of sacrifice, caregiving and saviour syndromes is turned on its head. Suri has a talent of shooting songs as part of the landscape in the mind (you do recall the on-camera attack frenzy at the end of Zaroorat in Ek Villain do you?).
There is a cool lapse montage in one of them, the earwormily titled Saiyaara, during which the moping of Krish remains steady over shots stitched across concert venues. Later, Krish races and falls in one of the stadiums landing up as a shadow on a pixelated picture of Vaani in a jumbotron. These episodes disclose something unnaturally effective in the massy diversion of interval, the artistic yearning of such, which Suri (and some pretenders of the 2000s coded Emraan-Hashmi) has abandoned in the past ten years.
Aneet Padda, who shone in the tawdry middle part Big Girls Don’t Cry (2024), brought a certain literary sheen to a female character who could have been merely an avenue of coming-of-age in the life of another person. Her Vaani occupies half of the time weeping, prettening up, and being disoriented, yet Padda is at the time of her playing as a protagonist who has a problem in taking on the weight of being one.
The movie begins (not with him) when she (yes, she) comes to court to get married in a quickie wedding, as a leading lady whose story is to write her own tale (she is literally writing in her diary at this point), but eventually she runs out of papers. New Zealand also has its iterations of the sloshy Sonia of Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai before she meets the Krish also riding on a speedy and shiny motorbike like Hrithik Roshan perfectly named Raj.
In case of Roshan (and Krish), Ahaan Pandays debut is one of those old-fashioned star-making roles where charisma beats lack of cunning in his character. There is something him that, perhaps prematurely, makes the big-screen manchild something less than human in a generation that knows nothing of the middle-ground between performative wokeness and toxicity. There is never a moment when I was not watching him, even when he was coming out of an awkward stage show, and he argues the case of nostalgia of hero gestures.
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