No small affair: "Saiyaara"

A sensation in its homeland and a sizeable word-of-mouth hit here, Saiyaara is the Hindi cinema trying to wipe the slate clean after its recent turbulence and initiate a complete reset. No overt flagwaving, no rapacious Universe building; just a girl and a boy standing in front of one another, as they used to back in your parents' day, and then being torn apart by forces beyond the pair's control, as they used to back in your grandparents' day. The wise and monied elders at Yash Raj Films have cast as their leads two untested newcomers (Aneet Padda and Ahaan Panday) whose youthful blankness is integral to the project entire: rather than craggy stars being handsomely rewarded for playing themselves or replaying the hits, these are fresh-out-the-box screens on which the target audience can project their innermost desires. Behind the camera: Mohit Suri, invited to revisit the kind of modern melodramas he was making (and having hits with) ten years ago before things got complicated and politicised, and which the wider industry has been making (and succeeding with) since more or less the year dot. The hope is that this might prove a return to innocence, and a purge of that cynicism and commercial calculation that has sent audiences fleeing to their sofas in droves. What Saiyaara commits to and goes all in on is getting the cinemagoer to forget what's gone before - even if it leaves us in the same vulnerable position as the film's Alzheimer's-stricken young heroine, eyes wide, damp and uncomprehending.

A strong element of Bollywood formula persists, nevertheless. The girl (Padda's Vaani Batra) is a delicate flower in her early twenties, jilted before the opening credits by her parents' preferred suitor, and adjusting to life in an intern role for the Mumbai news-and-gossip site Buzzlist (lol). The boy (Panday's Krish Kapoor) is a bad boy of sorts, a musician in possession of a motorcycle and five, six, seven, even eight o'clock shadow, introduced trashing Vaani's office before performing on a rainlashed stage in what seems a mighty health-and-safety risk. (A headstrong rebel such as Krish Kapoor cares nothing for your pettifogging red tape.) Already, you'll have a sense of how Saiyaara is operating out towards the remotest frontiers of plausibility, but the songs - keening, lavishly orchestrated numbers farmed out to a clutch of contemporary composers - really do matter, because they fill the gaps left by the film's resolute purging of ideology from the mainstream Hindi crowdpleaser; each number in turn insists, underlines and restates the prevailing idea that the firing of shells is as nothing compared to the beat of the human heart and the tabla drum. I suspect the soundtrack album (and attendant social-media clips) will have done the heavy promotional lifting here; Saiyaara is the film equivalent of the song that blows up on TikTok. Again, that has the ring of a backhanded compliment, but after a decade or more of Hindi films where the writing and composition have been all but an afterthought, there's something cherishable and semi-stirring about, say, the intense close-ups Suri shoots of Vaani journalling, and the way true love blossoms once boy and girl are set to collaborating on a song (music: him, lyrics: her) which eventually assumes a life of its own. Part of the movie's success surely lies in how deeply it leans - nay, swoons - into its characters' feelings: it takes those feelings as seriously as any Taylor Swift ballad, and more seriously, perhaps, than any movie since the Twilight saga. In scene after scene and track after track, Saiyaara tells us that the feelings you feel in your early twenties are the most important feelings you or anybody else is ever going to feel.

Does the film risk taking those feelings too seriously? The box-office receipts would provide a counterargument, but this did feel to me like one of those blockbusters with a very narrowly defined target audience; the further removed in years you are from your early-to-mid twenties, the less wowed and overwhelmed you're likely to be by it. These dry and weary peepers spotted at least a couple of imbalances and shortfalls in the material from the outset. It's not enough for Krish to be a canny musician, he has to be a gifted sportsman, single-minded thinker and catwalk-ready pin-up to boot; Suri's notionally going for Bollywood naturalism (or as close to Bollywood gets to naturalism) with his performers, but Krish at almost every stage seems less a playable character than an ideal someone's retrospectively built up in their head. (His only flaw is an alcoholic father, and even then, this Devdad functions as a plot device, used to explain away his boy's sporadic hotheadedness.) As Vaani, Padda - gorgeous by real-world standards, merely approachable by Hindi-heroine standards - has a lovely, dreamy gaze you're glad Suri committed to celluloid. But gaze is almost all Vaani does in Saiyaara: she gazes, she longs and she yearns. (I know there's already a musician on staff, but could they not have engineered one song for her to sing? As it is, she's never more than Krish's ideal audience, and the film's, too, soaking everything up with her eyes.) For all this production's purported innocence, Suri and his screenwriters are caught courting a particular strain of Gen Z narcissism, filming a demographic's best selves in what's both figuratively and literally the most flattering light. Vaani and Krish's big love scene takes place in a room full of screens and surfaces; the Jumbotron at Wembley Stadium cues a moment of recognition (and transcendent kitsch). The one real villain is the older guy who dumped poor Vaani before going on to make a bundle as the CEO of a dating app. Why bother with the bounders of Bumble, the film posits, when you could just as easily meet your forever-love over pen and paper?

The smallness and intensity remain selling points; it's as much a return to human intimacies as it is a return to zero, and that's clearly distinguished Saiyaara from all those clanking machine-movies with Part One bolted onto their titles. What the film most often resembles is Love Story (the 1970 film, not the Swift song) updated for a world its characters (and audience?) fear is beginning to spin too fast, getting away from them and scattering their marbles, cursing him with viral notoriety and her with the same affliction as the oldsters got in The Notebook. (I feel obliged to note: as dramatised, Vaani's Alzheimer's is less early-onset than exclusive pre-release, the Instagrammable kind you might become eligible for as a perk after twelve months on a rolling JioPhone contract.) The trouble is that in building this small affair into a Very Big Thing Indeed, Suri leaves everything beyond the lovers to fade into insignificance: the parents are naggy footnotes, Krish's band all but forgotten about. I became rapidly aware that Saiyaara may be less interesting as a film than as a swelling multiplex phenomenon, a curious state borne out by a full house on its second Monday night on release: half young women who snickered, sniffled and swooned, half young men intrigued enough to show up (or not miss out), but who weren't shy about performatively heckling the screen, as if we were collectively watching some wild mash-up of Titanic, Rocky Horror and The Room. Whatever has happened with Saiyaara, it appears to have sped up the usual process by which movies are seen, evaluated, discussed, embraced as art or rejected and re-embraced as trash. The movie itself is a funny little fluke in the middle of all this noise, as the Twilight films were, and while it's going some to get the lovers and the haters in the same room in 2025, I think if you keep your eyes on the screen, you can already see Padda and Panday looking around - in her case, gazing dreamily around - for the Hindi equivalents of Olivier Assayas and David Cronenberg they'll likely need to scuzz up or otherwise reclaim their image in a few years' time. Everything's accelerated nowadays.

Saiyaara is now playing in selected cinemas.