Saiyaara

It took two twenty-something newcomers to cause ripples at the box-office. The Ajay Devgn-led Son of Sardaar 2 pushed its release date. And those awaiting releases in August know they have a force to reckon with in Saiyaara. So, what’s about the intense musical romance that audiences cannot get enough of and are reacting to in a rather dramatic fashion? IV drip? Copious tears? All this despite a happy ending. Here are five reasons why director Mohit Suri and writer Sankalp Sadanah have crafter a winner. Saiyaara’s soundtrack has one earworm after another, with the title track particularly hitting all the right loving notes. Rendered by Kashmir’s indie artist Faheem Abdullah, this is Gen Z and Alpha’s “Tum Hi Ho” moment, a track which is likely to dominate the airwaves and streaming apps for a few years, like “Kesariya” did.

Krish (Ahaan Panday) is a hotheaded wannabe composer. Vaani (Aneet Padda) is an earnest wannabe journalist. We know this because Krish gets into a scuffle almost as soon as the film opens, and stomps off, leaving the chance of a lucrative gig behind. And Vaani (Aneet Padda) gets smirked at in her new workplace because she has no idea of how many Instagram followers she has as she has deleted her account. That these two very different characters will clash, meet, and come together is ordained, because this is a Mohit Suri film. That it will have soulful ballad-y music all over it is also expected, for the same reason.

Great loves look ordinary in close-ups. A man having black coffee because someone he loved liked it; a woman keeping the other side of her bed empty for days. A boy abandoning his future to take care of someone he loves; a girl refusing care to protect the person she loves. These are familiar stories of regular people, more common than one imagines. But there is greatness still, less in the falling and more in the telling, and few filmmakers do it like Mohit Suri. This is not to say that he has always been successful. If anything, the opposite is true. Suri’s filmography is dotted with variations of a similar kind of love story, and in the last couple of years, the balance has been scattered. It has been either too bizarre (Ek Villain Returns), too outlandish (Half Girlfriend) or too morose (Hamari Adhuri Kahani). Individually, these are peak attributes of a Mohit Suri film, and yet it took a while (more than a decade since Aashiqui 2) for things to fall into place, and then — rejoice!