Saiyaara Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
All these reports of advance ticket sales, lead actors being kept away from the limelight, genius marketing strategies, such incredible music! My expectations were sky high!
All I have to say after having watched the movie now is…..what are you guys talking about?
Kuch filmein intimate characters aur chhoti chhoti slice of life kahaaniyon ko lekar badi badi baatein keh jaati hain. Saiyaara iske bilkul alag hai, ekdum opposite in that it deploys the largest most melodramatic grand gestures to tell a tiny little story that doesn’t quite have much meaning beyond its existance as a buzzy Bollywood title.
Sabse pehle we meet Vaani Batra (played by Aneet Padda), a young woman reeling from being stood up at her wedding. Vaani is so prone to being forlorn, even on her wedding day, she is sitting and scribbling poems of true love. When we meet her again six months after the event, she is still gazing silently and sadly out of a window, an image we will see repeated often, her character development stubbornly stuck on these visual cues of loneliness and longing, because Vaani as a character,r is given very little to do beyond being devastated. Things only happen to her; she is rarely allowed to willingly participate. Her grief is so stylised and performative, the real person beneath with a life and trauma and conflicts, that is needed for a drama like this, never quite emerges.
Then there is Krish Kapoor: a rebellious musician who smokes like a douchebag, wears a gym bag like a douchebag, and frowns like a douchebag. He is confident, but wounded, which if you don’t quite get right away, is established using the following shots in the FIRST TWO SEQUENCES he is in, okay check this out- Beats up a journalist for reviewing his band (without consequences may I add), delivers angry lines about equality, plays an electric guitar alone on stage in the pouring rain as a crowd swells up around him hardly believing their luck, walks around half like Bhagat Singh half Jim Morrison, has sex with a random white woman in a public bathroom. Violence se virility tak ka safar jhatpat nipaate huye 2 sequence mein, Krish Kapoor is here to say, he is a MAN man.
Persona banaane ke chakkar mein, person toh dikha hi nahi.
Before we head toward the actual story, lemme make this clear — the problem here isn’t that these tropes exist — many good stories are built on familiar structures. The issue is that Saiyaara doesn’t interrogate or subvert any of them, despite the protagonists being Gen Z — the newest adult generation with some sort of life experience at this point to build their personalities upon. Because these tropes are outdated, and have been for a while, these are the kind of things Amy Poehler would make fun of on her podcast. Would 2 city kids, one of whom is in a rock band and the other hosts a podcast for a digital publication really say “abhi kuch pal aur bache hain merey paas”, unironically?
Soon enough, the film leans into the familiar dynamic of a broken man and the woman who is probably going to fix him. Krish has his own photo pn his phone’s wallpaper, loves himself the most thanks to being ignored by an alcoholic widowed father while Vaani is a naazo se pali papa ki pari who has never been taught to prioritise herself or deal with the real world. After a not-so-meet-cute, they get together to create a song she will write and he will compose for another famous singer. During this process it becomes evident that alas Vaani is once more attracted to a man who is going to treat her like she doesn’t know anything about anything. She says sorry when he yells at her. She listens in awe when he speaks. She says she can’t marry him until HE fulfills HIS destiny as a superstar. Her life can endlessly wait ,who cares?
As Krish ascends into fame, thanks to an unexpected development, Vaani begins to unravel emotionally and physically, as her erasure becomes more and more complete. Writer Sankalp Sadanah perhaps might even be attempting a comment here on the cruelty of tempting fate- a woman who doesn’t want to be seen, soon might only HAVE that option available to her.
Undoubtedly, it’s a sincere and cruel twist of fate to base a love story on. However Saiyaara is so eager to drive its tragedy home, that, through its run time, every single moment is high-intensity drama which gives way to more melodrama without allowing the viewer to settle into any feeling for longer than 10 seconds. Almost every scene is pitched at the tonal equivalence of a climactic moment, over and over again with little progression or room for reflection. Harr quite aur introspective moment ko background score ke sailaab mein dubaa denge, toh human condition par jo tippani karne ki koshish hai, who tenderly human ke andar pravesh shayad na karr paaye.
Also, for a film heavily built around a musician’s journey, the soundtrack of Saiyyara is surprisingly indistinct, I honestly left the theatre humming Sohail Sen and Kausar Munir’s ‘Saiyyara Main Saiyyara’ from YRF’s own Ek Thaa Tiger. While this film wants to be remembered as a musical love story, its soundscape doesn’t offer the kind of emotional layering that a film like this demands. The music doesn’t change shape or escalate, or even adapt to the screenplay, barring perhaps a few notes in the title track Siyaara where you can hear a live audience sing along with Krish. The rest of the songs can be plucked from anywhere and added in somewhere else in the screenplay, without much consequence.
Look, Saiyaara clearly knows its aesthetic — moody city lights, slow-motion rain, lonely silhouettes of heart broken people, all of it is designed by Mohit Suri to give the world another Aditya Roy Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor. And to a large extent, the attempt is successful once again. Aneet Padda, who was impressive in the otherwise unwatchable Prime video series Big Girls Don’t Cry, is once again just that, impressive. She is good looking and expressive, THIS just isn’t the performance I would rest my judgement of her acting abilities upon. Similarly for Ahaan Pandey, there is so much to draw from while playing the heartbroken tough guy, the performance is undeniably derivative, Ranbir, Sanjay Dutt, Shahid — Krish Kapoor is an amalgam of many Hindi cinema heroes playing prevalent male archetypes. However, there is an unmistakable and undisputable spark there, I hope for better projects for the actor.
Saiyaara does speak to heartbreak of various kinds and what that does to an otherwise happy seeming human life, when a partner dies, when someone leaves you, the pain of beginning to learn how to love for the first time, how an illness change a relationship, withing one small life people do experience most if not all of these feelings and the complicated effect they have. However, in this film, its all said in language we’ve heard just too many times, often from director Mohit Suri himself.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10 Saiyyara is….3–4 baar krish is shown to pick up a guitar and 10s of 100s of people just stop in their tracks to listen to him and start clapping like it’s an Instagram reel. I’m seriously having a real tough time wrapping my head around the hype, if you disagree with me, let me know in the comments, or dont, I may or may not read who knows.
