Saiyaara, someone explains in the middle of this medical love story (love means never having to say you are scary), is a special star in the constellation which shines in isolation.
“I want you to be the star,” the girl who is losing her memory to Alzheimer’s tells her arrogant boyfriend, who thinks he is a rock star even before he becomes one. This is the kind of complacent guy who clambers on the top of a bus, sure that the clamouring crowds outside are for him.
Newcomer Ahaan Pandey seems an uppity country cousin to Aditya Roy Kapoor in Mohit Suri’s Aashiqui 2, a far superior film about a troubled singer-hero. Ahaan’s Krish has Daddy issues (Varun Bandola shining in a criminally brief role). Ahaan’s Krish Kapoor (a name as filmy as it can get), a mix of Aditya Kapoor in Aashiqui and Vijay Devarakonda in Liger, is the kind of smug self-serving guy who pushes around his father in a show of martyred hatred that is a typical Mohit Suri headbanger.
Suris’s writers, Sankalp Sandesh and Rohan Shankar, ease the young upstart into the love story with an easygoing fluency. The young couple does look like it is indeed in love, and that is the film’s biggest draw.
We are drawn into Krish’s commitment to make Vaani as comfortable in life as possible, even if it means putting aside his dreams of being a rock star. The sudden spurt of self-annihilation in Krish is hard to digest. Where did that come from?!
And where are the songs worth taking home? For a film where the heroine has a fading memory, writes songs, the songs are the kind that fade from memory quickly. The film boasts eight composers. But not a single song matches the elegance and evocativeness of Aashiqui 2, forget the original Aashiqui.
What stays are stolen moments between the couple: the way Krish ties Vaani (named after Yash Raj’s favourite actress?) to his waist when riding pillion with her, the way he stretches the time spent with her juicing every second, the way he cordons her from extraneous hurt when she is no more in control of her mind… all this works well within the given parameters of the film’s boutique-illness format.
There is also a feelingly written moment between Krish and his future mother-in-law where she feeds him dahi as a shagun and he doesn’t know how to accept her gesture.
Here again, there is an entire problematic area of plotting. Why would the parents of a mentally ailing girl allow her to be taken away for two months to Alibaug? More problematic is the return of Vaani’s ex-boyfriend, who had ditched her at the altar? Why bring in a live villain, and that too a grating buffoon? When there is already a villain in the story: Alzheimer’s?
Mohit Suri’s cinema tends to be swept away in the tidal waves of operatic emotions. Saiyaara is no exception. It is not a great romantic saga by any standards, suffering as it does from congenital melodramatization. But it has its moments. And the lead pair gets the interactive vibes right most of the time, even the writing gets laboured and lazy.
