Saiyaara movie review: Sigh of relief!

SaiyaaraUA RomanceDir Mohit SuriCast Ahaan Panday Aneet PaddaRating 35Right with his opening sequence the young debutant hero here takes on nepotism rather headonNepotism being the largely Bollywood term now which means networking everywhere else Hero barges into the office of a popculture website Buzzlist whacks the hell out of its music reviewer WhyBecause that critic in an album review chooses not to name the hero at all while hersquos the lead vocalist The reviewer mentions a nondescript member of the band instead because that bloke is wellconnectedThe hero teaches a lesson or two on the mediarsquos fixation with nepotist kids mdash covering their airport looks et al mdash wholly ignoring the more deserving talents in their placeIn a sense this is a story about credit in popular arts As in how much you get paid is often directly proportional to the credit including ownership rights that yoursquore willing to abandonIt should appeal to a lot of people even in mainstream Bollywood Who at a certain stage in their careers have inevitably been happy to deliver anonymously as ghost writers composers lyricists etc So long as theyrsquore suitably remunerated for their anonymity At its juicy core though this is a trueblue young traditional Bollywood romance mdash the sorts that have launched moviestar careers And I suppose must continue toHow else to best connect with a new couple on the big screen than to gauge how they deeply feel for each other mdash for the audience to feel the same for their filmPain and tragedy are usually siblings of such a romance with music mdash particularly dardbhare songslyrics mdash as the effective medium to express melancholyWhat else are the common tropes Plenty of boxes aesthetically checked hereAlong with the bewda baap drunk dad the hero for instance is inevitably blessed with a selfless dost friend In this case the boyrsquos Alam Khan from a similar role in popular Gen Z webdrama Kota Factory 201921The filmrsquos title itself is often derived from the lyrics of a popular Bollywood number Saiyaara is a track from the Yash Raj Filmsrsquo YRF romantic thriller Ek Tha Tiger 2012 starring Salman Khan Katrina KaifYRF OG producers of Bollywood romances is the studio backing this filmWhat does Saiyaara really mean Literally in Urdu a wandering star As a line in this film explains ldquoWoh taara jo ek jagah pe na thehre par apni chaal na badlehelliprdquo Consistently travelling without losing themselves along the wayThe untested stars as in leads of this film are Ahaan Panday 27 and Aneet Padda 23 God knows Bollywood with its own geriatric crisis for almost three decades could do with strong 20something talents headlining films for the young that are about the youngWhat to make of Panday and Padda then I think it works the same way when we meet someone new mdash sometimes we tend to compare them with those we already knowIn the sense of firstly how they look and if they remind you of someoneIf I were to create Padda on AI assigning attributes I might end up prompting Radhikka Madan for the look perhaps with a touch of Ananya Panday and the vibe of Aditi Rao HydariTherersquos even a shot of hers in the film with just the upper half of her face that possibly looks like Alia Bhatt That said as an actor she comes across suitably soft on the screen with a mind and presence of her ownThe same can be said for the muscular masculine relatively relaxed and restrained PandayI guess because he plays a tanned vocalist with timbre for ballads and the beard in place mdash I just imagined Atif Aslam who incidentally debuted in Bollywood with the cracker number Woh Lamhein Woh Baatein at 19 in Mohit Surirsquos Zeher 2005Saiyaara is another fullon musical by Suri whose entire body of work is likely to be remembered for its soundtracks alone Irsquom told 5070 superhit songs Itrsquos hard to tell which track in this album each shot like a dream is likely to be hummed foreverThe way people or at least I still hum Sunn Raha Hai from Surirsquos Aashiqui 2 2013 But even more so the title track from Surirsquos Hamari Adhuri Kahani 2015Those songs mostly grow on you like earworms since you canrsquot subsequently escape them wherever you go anywayThatrsquos unlike Anurag Basursquos MetroIn Dino from a couple of weeks ago where you instantly hummed Pritamrsquos Qayde Se or Aur Mohabbat Kitni Karoon heading homeBoth Basu and Suri being the rsquo80srsquo90s master Mahesh Bhattrsquos proteacutegeacutes They also belong to the vintage when once confident with a soundtrack one could altogether skip figuring out the rest of the filmCould say that for a lot of Surirsquos movies especially thrillers Ek Villain Returns Malang etc Not so with Saiyaara mdash about two broken people simply out there for each other Viscerally romantic thoughtThere is also that precious sense of the big screen in the smaller moments even if captured through montage for a song The girl has been previously hit by heartbreak The boy is struggling to make ends meet simultaneously seeking fame fighting demons within and withoutA major concern with modern romances is often a believable conflict Here itrsquos a circumstance The girlrsquos losing memory And you do careWhether or not the moviersquos memorable which is a function of time mdash given young romances with their clicheacutes were getting deemed dated as a Bollywood genre mdash Saiyaara is by no means a forgettable filmThatrsquos saying a lot Also saying it with a sigh of relief