Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan

A title like Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan spells trouble. It signals the surge of poetry about to overwhelm the screen. Conversations, voiceovers, song lyrics — everything is tuned to Radio Metaphor in Santosh Singh’s romantic drama. “She saw me not with sight, but insight,” says the hero, a visually-impaired man, of his beloved. A beat later: pyaar andha hota hai (love is blind). The film’s obsession with sight-based metaphors and poetic punning becomes… a blind spot. They meet on the train to Dehra. Jahaan (Vikrant Massey) is a musician and a songwriter, low on inspiration, seeking a creative reset in the hills. The passenger opposite him, in the coupe, is Saba (Shanaya Kapoor), a theatre artiste wanting to break into Hindi films. She’s wearing a blindfold (it’s prep for an important audition, she says) and has resolved not to remove it till the end of her trip. Since her manager bailed at the last minute, Saba has to travel alone and unattended. This means two things: (1) method acting, not family connections, is clearly the key to Bollywood. (2) Saba doesn’t realise that her co-passenger, with whom she’s struck up a lively rapport, is not a sighted person. Curiously, Jahaan plays along.

It’s been years since I’ve laughed so much in a cinema hall. I needed it. Movies are truly the best medicine. There’s only one problem, though. Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is not a comedy. It’s not supposed to be funny. If anything, it’s the opposite of a comedy — a dead-serious romantic drama that takes an old proverb too far. In an age where most Bollywood films use self-awareness as a front for mediocrity, it’s kind of disarming to watch a bad film that doesn’t know it’s bad. I almost admire it. We often complain that nobody makes timeless Hindi love stories anymore. Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is why. It’s a high-risk genre: the line between being lyrical and being incapable of touching grass is wafer-thin. One person’s Dreamy is another’s Delusional. But naming the movie after a song from a Sanjay Leela Bhansali classic can’t be a prayer.

Cough, cough. Saba Shergill (Shanaya Kapoor) has blindfolded herself on the train to Mussoorie to prep for an audition to play a visually challenged girl. For no apparent reason, Jahan (Vikrant Massey) gets a slap from her as an introduction. But, cough, cough, he’s a musician, he should understand another artiste. The cough disappears, inexplicably. She’s stranded in Mussoorie, inexplicably. She clings to the stranger on the train, inexplicably. Even moves into his hotel room. “Come, I’ll show you around my house,” he says, inexplicably. When did a hotel room turn into a house? Jahan has an assistant-cum-driver, a general factotum. Who talks of a chidiya (sparrow) that talks (everybody laugh, Saba and Jahan do) and tells them a ghost story (everybody shiver, Saba and Jahan do, she even moves into his bed).

Strangers meeting on a train and falling in love has led to epic romances from Pakeezah to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Never though the experience has felt as bogus and bizarre as Saba and Jahaan’s blind encounter in Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan. Directed by Santosh Singh for a script ‘created’ by Mansi Bagla, the farfetched premise inspired by Ruskin Bond’s short story The Eyes Have It, revolves around Saba (Shanaya Kapoor), a blindfolded theatre actress eyeing Bollywood stardom and Jahaan (Vikrant Massey), a sightless songwriter traveling from Delhi to Dehradun on a train with a VFX view. Whatever poetic allusions the makers want to build on what it means to see or feel through the eyes of one’s soul are lost in the sheer senselessness of the plot.

Most films use metaphors. Santosh Singh’s Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is a metaphor. It is a metaphor for a privileged person, born with cultural capital, going an extra mile to convince themself of having earned the privilege. It is a metaphor for a nepo baby making her debut and holding the hand of a gifted outsider in the journey. And finally, it is a metaphor for the collective blindness of the Hindi film industry to quality, resulting in a film like Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan. Before one calls me out for ridiculing blindness, let me just put it out there: it is the film which is insensitive. Written by Mansi Bagla (also the writer of the 2022 film, Forensic— a forewarning), Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is supposedly an adaptation of Ruskin Bond’s short story, The Eyes Have It. I exercise caution because what we have here is a butchered version of Bond’s three-page stirring short story that, characteristically, marries emotional nuance with light-heartedness. On the contrary, Singh’s film is anchored by delusion and bogged down by incompetence. It is designed as a sweeping love story (characters talk like they are play-acting Laila Majnu in real life), scored like a magnum opus lite (Vishal Mishra is the composer and singer) and unfolds like multiple disconnected reels. Actors speak in the same pitch for different emotions, as if each scene exists in isolation. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It is difficult to tell with Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan.