Early on in Chand Mera Dil, two lovers in the throes of a feverish college romance do something weird. They’ve just been arrested for public indecency after stopping the motorcycle in the middle of a busy highway so that she can straddle him for an intimate discussion about their future. I’m all for dramatic gestures, but why risk becoming roadkill for a random film-poster moment? But this is not the weird thing. When they’re at the police station, she starts crying when he admits to having quit cigarettes for her. She explains that she isn’t used to such importance because her father was a wife-beater and her childhood sucked; he also chimes in with his two cents of sadness. Of all the ways their little heart-to-heart could’ve been staged, this has the least sense of occasion and timing. Get a room, but read the room first.
It’s still better than a montage in which their families disown them on learning that they’re pregnant only for the merry engineering college and its principal to support the couple as if the students were the natural descendants of the ones in Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne Lage (where they hid the heroine in the boys hostel so that she could live with the hero and do his friends’ laundry). It’s a tad better than a proposal at a railway station where he spreads his arms like a dated Shah Rukh Khan fan, she leaps on him, and they tumble onto the platform inches away from an incoming train. Or the time she follows the word “abortion” with “dead sure” without a hint of dark humour; or the time they decide to celebrate their rift with a cutesy roleplay session on their anniversary night. In short, Chand Mera Dil is a remarkably needy and attention-seeking film. It’s the cinematic equivalent of that people-pleasing cousin at weddings who will stop at nothing — including a food-eating contest at the buffet and a blinding fireworks display — to be noticed.
The result is one of the strangest-looking movies I’ve seen in a while. The film-making goes into overdrive, almost like it doesn’t trust the script and actors to convey Moody Feeling. It tries so hard to be an aesthetic. The ad-coded compositions, the radioactive lighting, the gimmicky panning and tracking and silhouettes and look-at-me cinematography, the frantic cutting and tight close-ups of lips and footwear and objects, the curated intensity of the music — it’s a bit like watching the fabled language of Imtiaz Ali and (editor) Aarti Bajaj go sideways. The technical departments do their best to be visible in every shot. The camera moves faster than the characters, threatening the unsuspecting viewer with motion sickness if they do not submit to young love. A confrontation in the end unfolds on a stormy night in a room with sepia-lit windows that violently rattle and slam against the hinges to distract us from the comical hollowness of the scene. The drunken windows give the performance of their lives. But all I can wonder is: Wong Kar Why?
Speaking of non-human performances, the only hour that seems to exist in this story is Golden Hour. For a film called Chand Mera Dil (“my heart is the moon”) whose primary character is named Chandni, it’s fitting that the sun becomes the obsessive antagonist. It remains hyperactive and omnipresent; no character’s face is allowed to appear without being bathed in warm twilight and music-video hues. The frisky sun finds a way to shine everywhere, even at night (spotlights and blinding glares); at one point, science takes a hike and a new apartment is introduced with sunlight streaming in from all directions. When in doubt, multiple suns are summoned to create a soft atmosphere in Hyderabad. And the film is in perpetual doubt, so the sundowner vibes never leave. In the words of Captain Jack Sparrow: Where’s me rum?
The attempt is to present a dreamy Saathiya-coded couple followed by their struggle to deal with the responsibilities of sudden adulthood: the honeymoon phase is cut short by post-end-credits turmoil. I get the reckless attractions of adolescence and the on-again-off-again patterns, but this particular couple does the Gen-Z image no favours. When one of the parents (Manish Chaudhari has a way with scowls) compares their relationship to the warranty period of an LED bulb, it’s supposed to be a serious moment, but the theatre around me burst into giggles because of how legitimate his frustrations sound. It’s not a good sign when boomers who groan “kids these days” are validated by the self-sabotaging ways of Instagram-filter babies.
Movies like this, and Ek Din some weeks ago, prove how difficult it is to make all-out love stories these days. It’s not as simple as a earwormy title track and an affected heroine. The trailer of Chand Mera Dil suggested that the wake turbulence of Saiyaara might claim another casualty. But the identity crisis of new-age romantic dramas is much deeper. They’re often stranded between modernity and tradition, between woke conflicts and old-fashioned emotions. For instance, Chandni (an at-sea Ananya Panday) is supposed to be the driving force and strong-minded core of the film. She strives to break the cycle of trauma and puts her foot down the second she detects signs of Kabir Singh-styled masculinity in Aarav (an at-sea Lakshya). The idea is to be progressive and subvert convention by making emotionally volatile male partners suffer the consequences of their actions.
But the film is so compulsively designed by men that the idea backfires spectacularly. It is inherently inclined towards Aarav and his victimhood and his angst. As a result, it bats against Chandni without realising it, turning her into one of the most unreasonable and fickle-minded red flags under the pretext of agency and independence. Right from the get-go, she sounds like she has a single-point agenda (starting with a meet-cute innuendo about the colour of her coffee and underwear), makes the worst and most obsessive decisions possible, argues him under the table when cornered, and then holds their love hostage to her whims until he cracks and she has someone to blame. It’s as if she were willing him to make a mistake so that she has her alibi to imitate the protagonist from The Worst Person in the World (2021).
The second half gets off on Chandni putting Aarav through the wringer because broken and repentant men are all the rage. It’s as if the movie hopes to teach him a lesson but doesn’t have the heart to, so it hides behind her cruelty instead. And how cruel she is; even the light shies away from her in some scenes. I know I sound like a typical man right now, but I swear it’s not me, it’s the film. It seems to be oblivious to Chandni’s nature; the writing of her character is so counterintuitive that it burns. This ends up reinforcing the popular narrative of toxic romance with a what-is-love-without-some-madness grin (more like ‘Haseen Dull-ruba’), before hitting us with a climax that sacrifices chemistry and continuity at the altar of prepackaged intent and visual volume. Perhaps the only way to enjoy the film, then, is to see it as a twisted love triangle about someone’s son and someone’s daughter stalked by a deranged sun.