Why is Mohit Suri's ‘Saiyaara' a sleeper super hit?

The Hindu

5 days ago

One moment, you are having a cozy time in the arms of your lover at a concert, and the next, you're on camera. And now the whole world knows about your affair and nothing can fix you! This week, we decrypt the phenomenon of anti-climax in the recent releases.
'Saiyaara': Chemistry, Commerce and Cinema
Mohit Suri set the box office on fire overnight with his sleeper super hit Saiyaara, featuring newbies Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda. Is good old-fashioned romance back with a bang? Why are people loving it? Also, why is everyone crying?
Walter White explained chemistry as the study of change — growth, decay, and transformation. And that precisely is the plot of Saiyaara. Sheer chemistry.
Debutant Ahaan Panday plays a brooding, angry young rockstar. Aneet Padda plays a shy romantic girl. Opposites attract, the chemistry crackles, and fate plays anti-climax. It's the chemistry of music and lyrics. He's music. She's lyrics. And their romance is the making of a great love song.
What really makes this love story set our hearts on fire is that innocence and passion of young love that we see in the eyes of the lead pair. Ahaan and Aneet sell it — all the heavyweight, Mohit Suri–variety drama that powers the film along a similar trajectory as Rockstar, but in spirit, it's probably closer to 50 First Dates if you replace all the laughs with tears.
Writers Sankalp S. Sadhanand (story & screenplay) and Rohan Shankar (dialogues) bring these characters to life — opposites who fall in love poetically and go through change, decay, and transformation, with all the intensity expected from this broken-heart, fading-mind dynamic.
And the choice of medical condition could easily be a metaphor for forgetting the present and mentally living in the past — with the imminent danger of forgetting it all, given the ADHD of dwindling attention spans and the time we spend lost in thought.
There's something charming about song lyrics doubling up as love letters as the kids fall in love, and we can't help but root, given the sparks and manic kinetic energy with which Suri captures the turbulence in this whirlwind romance — with an epic arc that would have made Yash Chopra smile.
Just the sheer poetry of the worlds of the hard and the soft, the bitter and the sweet, dysfunction and order, and of art and commerce clashing and transforming each other. That this chemistry also set the box office on fire is surely news to cheer — despite a couple of scenes that go a bit… as the kids say, extra!
Rom Coms and Reality Checks:
Lena Dunham, who shot to fame with her bold and refreshing reality check on the Sex and the City–variety of chick flick storytelling, is back with yet another delightful reality check — this time on the Emily in Paris–variety of Brit rom-coms.
Too Much is too much fun and a bit too relatable, given its expectation-vs-reality meme-type takedown of rom-com tropes with modern-day anti-climax. Like Girls, Too Much keeps it real, messy, and uncomfortable. The dysfunction in our lives and the far-from-pretty realities of relationships drive this series of ugly truths that feel lived-in because they are — the character is based on Lena Dunham herself.
The men she writes are far from rom-com clichés — complex individuals and better written than the 'strong female lead' characters written by men. While most rom-coms make finding a man to love the biggest problem women have, the men don't fit into the primary needs of Dunham's protagonists
The bigger conflict in Girls is the relationship she has with other women — her best friends. In Too Much too, the bigger conflict is the relationship she has with a woman she doesn't know, except that her ex left her for the other.
Women in Lena Dunham's world resolve to never let a man get in between them .Megan Stalter — the spunky assistant–turned–partner in Hacks — makes for a very fun version of Lena Dunham, who is in the show too, playing her older sister. Despite all the hard truth bombs, Too Much still has that soft spot for rom-coms — the comfort food for women. So yeah, it never gets as uncomfortable or disturbing as Girls — this one's a lot lighter and more hopeful.
R. Madhavan is back in a rom-com Aap Jaisa Koi, opposite Fatima Sana Shaikh
The plot unfolds as a 40-year-old virgin with a curse — straight out of Good Luck Chuck — meets his polar opposite and falls in love. But then he finds out her secret, and the conservative in him is unable to process it.
The leads, Madhavan and Fatima, do make this derivative rom-com work if your expectations are basic — but we've seen similar smash-the-patriarchy clashes executed better before. It just made me want to revisit the Varun Dhawan–Alia Bhatt film Badrinath Ki Dulhania for how organic and sincere the transformation felt in it.
TV Gold Must-Watch of the Week: The Hunt
The Hunt — The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case on Sony LIV — a platform I don't watch often because it offers no Chromecast streaming support. So I ended up watching on my phone after all the good buzz around it.
ALSO READ:'No blazing climax, no glory at the end': Director Nagesh Kukunoor decodes 'The Hunt'
I was blown away by the sheer authenticity of the recreation of the manhunt for Rajiv Gandhi's killers — and the auteur's voice. It's not just about telling you what really happened during the manhunt, but putting the lens on the biggest story between the scenes and lines — that of red tape and bureaucracy of those times.
Nagesh Kukunoor, with writers Rohit Banawlikar and Sriram Raghavan, tells the story from a place of truth — and it shows. Especially in how we see the humanity of people on either side of the hunt. Given the explosive subject and sensitivity of the case, Nagesh Kukunoor stays in full control of the story — proving that you can tell the boldest of stories in the trickiest of times if you focus on the people, not the politics.
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