Chand Mera Dil

Love stories must return to Bollywood. In an era of toxic masculinity and mind-numbing violence that dominate the box office today, the soothing familiarity of the romantic films of the late ’90s and early 2000s seems like an inviting proposition. Additionally, a millennial like me would want Dharma Productions to support this cause along with Yash Raj Films for simply having set romance ideals through their films. I could sense that from my smile when the opening credits of Chand Mera Dil flashed Karan Johar’s name. The floodgates of movie memories opened until the last slate revealed the director’s name: Vivek Soni. Could he do a decent romance, never mind cult-worthy?

At a time when mainstream romance usually oscillates between airbrushed fantasy and comedy, with a dash of toxic masculinity, Vivek Soni’s Chand Mera Dil arrives as a grounded, mature counter-narrative. It subverts the grammar of a Bollywood musical melodrama, or what we call the Dharma production tropes, to deliver a sharp dissection of modern intimacy with a melancholic flourish. After a long time, a love story doesn’t dump career and bread and butter issues. Aarav (Lakshya) and Chandni (Ananya Panday) are not flaky cardboards. Besides the raging hormones, they come across as believable engineering students facing rigorous academic pressures. They do not drop out when life gets messy. The writing (Vivek, Tushar Paranjpe, and Akshat Ghildiyal) respects their intellect and ambition, showing that pursuing career ambitions isn’t an alternative to a love story, or vice versa. It is a heavy framework within which the love story must exist, and Ananya Panday and Lakshya strike a delicate equilibrium to anchor the film’s transition from a lyrical college romance into a stark, mature reality. They establish an effortless physical and emotional intimacy early on, making the eventual fracture sting all the more.

Early on in Chand Mera Dil, two lovers in the throes of a feverish college romance do something weird. They’ve just been arrested for public indecency after stopping the motorcycle in the middle of a busy highway so that she can straddle him for an intimate discussion about their future. I’m all for dramatic gestures, but why risk becoming roadkill for a random film-poster moment? But this is not the weird thing. When they’re at the police station, she starts crying when he admits to having quit cigarettes for her. She explains that she isn’t used to such importance because her father was a wife-beater and her childhood sucked; he also chimes in with his two cents of sadness. Of all the ways their little heart-to-heart could’ve been staged, this has the least sense of occasion and timing. Get a room, but read the room first.