Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda are very good in this young-adult story about a musician and a writer facing relationship issues. The rest of this review may contain spoilers
Early in Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara, a beautiful young woman gets some shocking news. She faints. Later, we learn that it wasn’t the news that made her faint as much as the shock, the stress. This woman has the habit of writing in a diary. Later, we learn that there’s something more to this habit than just her wanting to be a writer. At one point, while bending down to tie her shoelaces, this woman looks up and is distracted by a good-looking man. She gets up and goes where she needs to go, but she forgets the diary in her hand, which she had placed on a pillar while she was tying her shoelaces. This point, too, adds to the character of this young woman, whose name is Vaani (Aneet Padda). Something is going on with her. It’s the thing that will become the obstacle in her love for Krish (Ahaan Panday).
It’s the classic opposites-attract premise. Krish is a bad-boy musician. Vaani is a soft-spoken writer. He has the tunes. She has the words. It’s a match made in heaven, which is where the title (meaning ‘moving star’) comes from. Krish wants to become a musical star, and Vaani calls him her ‘saiyaara’ – her moving star. Again, we slowly learn why he is “moving”, and why he won’t always be in her orbit. In an early scene, Vaani tells Krish, “Dimaag bhool jaata hai par dil bhoolta nahin.” These turn out to be prophetic words in this rock-solid, elegantly staged romantic melodrama. It takes a whole bunch of clichés and dusts the cobwebs off. The effect is that of reading a good John Green young-adult novel that spans about two years.
The writing is clean. The time transitions (6 months later, one year later) are handled with ease, and everything ties together neatly. Krish has a father who’s alcoholic, but the man’s inability to forget his dead wife comes back as a plot point when Krish needs a reality check. Vaani had a terrible boyfriend. He returns, and he behaves terribly (as expected) – but even now, Vaani is unable to erase him from her memories. Vaani’s parents are not too happy about Krish’s entry in their daughter’s life, and we wonder how Krish will discover Vaani’s big secret, but these scenes are handled with a great deal of dignity and without the easy melodrama that these situations could have generated. The dialogues help. When Vaani’s mother catches her crying, she asks her to stop. “Parathe mein mirchi zyade ho gaye. Thode aansoo uske liye bhi bacha ke rakh.” I smiled.
I had two minor issues with Saiyaara. One, the film could have used more intensity. And two, not all songs burst out with the happy-making feel of Vishal Mishra’s ‘Tum Ho Toh’. But the leads are very good (Ahaan even puts over a nepo-kid joke without a trace of irony), and that’s what you want in a love story. Their first kiss is almost involuntary. It occurs at a concert, with Krish and Vaani being pushed closer by the people dancing around them. Their falling-in-love makes you feel it’s inevitable. When Krish asks Vaani if she will marry him, her reaction is wonderfully mature. Mohit Suri shapes these two performances with a calming hand. The dialogues have beautiful pauses, and the sound effects that convey a condition are wonderfully used. At one point, Vaani cheerfully (a little too cheerfully) sends Krish off to a concert, but as he gets into the cab, you can see that he senses something is a little off. This is a film where the faces (and not just the lines) tell a story. And the ending is just the right flavour of bittersweet. Like Krish tells Vaani in an earlier scene, “I love you right now.” Why think too much about the future, when the present moment is all we have.
