Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan

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.