On ‘Saiyaara’, 'Metro... In Dino' and The Resurgence of Subjective Entertainment

Last month, I watched Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara for the third time. The week before, I had gone in for round two of Anurag Basu’s Metro... In Dino. Repeat viewings in 2025 are a strange thing. It’s even stranger if you’re someone who writes about Hindi cinema for a living. But the reviews were done, and in both cases, the limitations of rigorous film criticism — the job of decoding a work of art through the transience of opinion — came to the fore. The ink hadn’t dried and the feelings kept expanding. As I again stayed seated through the end credits — in thrall of Shreya Ghoshal’s reprise of the Saiyaara title track (a fine Youtube comment: “if the male version is pain, the female version is medicine”) as if it were a Marvel post-credits twist — I felt amused by my own behaviour.

I can’t recall the last time I spent an entire month basking in the ‘mood’ of a movie: revisiting, swooning, debating, sharing, soundtrack-binging, analysing, combing the Internet for daily fixes. In a cruel twist of fate, my third watch coincided with a special screening of Masaan (celebrating 10 years) in an adjacent hall. Which means I bumped into several cinephiles and critically acclaimed film-makers in the lobby like a sheepish serial killer with a secret. There was nothing to be ashamed of, yet the irony was undeniable; I was hesitant to own my Bollywood-ness in a decidedly high-brow setting. But my conflict had less to do with others and more to do with myself. I was “Sai-curious”: how in the world had I become such a Saiyaara simp?

I suppose the initial reasons hinge on an intellectual engagement with the film. This is an age of hyperawareness in which most of us are wired to rationalise our choices before trusting them, so we tend to look for deeper meaning. I found some, too. Like the first half unfolding as a familiar manchild template — the sullen hero wants to be fixed; the heroine is happy to exist in service of him — only for the second half to subvert it, sucker-punch the viewer and suggest that she was the Saiyaara (“a wandering star, a guiding light”) all along; it was Vaani’s sky and Krish was just gazing up at it. Or the neat callback of Krish being introduced as an angry artist who beats up a journalist for not mentioning his name in a review only for his future to be defined by a soulmate needing to remember his name. Or the way Vaani observes him early on — he thinks she can’t take her eyes off him because of how masculine and mysterious he is, but she’s actually concentrating harder on moments and identities because her brain is struggling to process them normally anymore. Or the lyricism of Vaani eventually having to fall in love with Krish over and over again — every day, maybe every minute — because of her Alzheimer’s. Not even her condition can supply her martyr-like desire to forget him; not even a shrinking mind can alter the cache of her heart. Much of this framework already exists in A Moment To Remember (2004), the South Korean drama that Saiyaara generously borrows from. So perhaps the reasons are a little more primal.

A mainstream Hindi film today faces a very different challenge from its predecessors. It no longer starts from a space of fantasy, where the only thing that mattered to the audience was how big it could dream or how aspirational it could be. It now starts from a space of reality, where the only thing that matters is how convincing it looks or how relatable it sounds. It first has to break through the overinformed ego of the new-age viewer — the first line of defense featuring a scrutiny of plot, detail, reasoning, continuity — before daring to entertain. The default language of watching has changed; it’s more about holding on than letting go. These films then have an uphill task: they must both reawaken and legitimise our impulse to be human. They must operate in the narrative tension between fantasy and reality — a space where artistic authenticity has to keep offsetting, and defeating, logical expression. It has to create in the viewer the constant will to forget the plausibility of thinking for the truth of feeling; to forget the mind and see with the heart.

In other words, the modern audience is Vaani and the movie is Krish. Till she’s diagnosed, she even behaves like a conventional onlooker, crying and living for him while he confronts his trauma. But the roles are reversed and soon it’s the movie that must search for its stricken audience. When she remembers him against all the odds in the end, the scene acquires the stakes of commercial Hindi cinema having the conviction to undo our conditioning and relive the joy of letting go. For many, it manufactures a sense of nostalgia between screen and eyes, trading the scale of originality for the spectacle of sentimentality.

Saiyaara is full of such moments and vibes that paper over the cracks of its script and creative licenses. There’s one in the opening strands of 'Barbaad' leading up to their first kiss: the chaos of a concert crowd keeps pushing them closer to each other, evoking the illusion of two hearts beating uncontrollably until they touch. There’s the perfect musicality of that climax where Krish reacts viscerally — his body crumbling in relief — when the title track restarts with a lost stanza (“Jis roz hum-tum/phir se milenge”) the second she recognises him. There’s the addictive aesthetic of specific shots: he strides into his own concert while clutching her diary in slow-mo, the pyrotechnics and strobe lights ‘revealing’ his entry with a defiant guitar riff. Or the uncanny timing of the guitarist’s leap on stage as the camera swoops over them. Or the way Krish sprints to a giant picture of Vaani’s eyes and collapses like a devotee rediscovering his faith. Most of these shots are designed to go for broke and seduce us into forgiving the film’s cerebral loopholes.

It’s not just Saiyaara, of course. In the last couple of months, there’s been a small resurgence of old-fashioned commercial cinema — where the satisfaction of seeing a great song or immersing oneself in a fluid montage is enough to emphasise the individualism of art. Anurag Basu’s Metro... In Dino, his spiritual sequel to Life in a… Metro (2007), pivots on Pritam’s album so hard that it’s impossible to let the patchiness of the film distort our sensory experience of it. What I was left with were flashes of melodic faultlessness that transcended the faultlines — a wife’s rage when she flings her cheating husband’s clothes out of the elevator; the crescendo of a rock ballad softening to let us hear a young woman call her partner a ‘loser’; the isolated tragedy of a weeping old widower in his kitchen. In fact, during my second watch, I literally held my breath in anticipation of my favourite tracks. I don’t remember when I had last ‘waited’ for songs in a Bollywood movie. There’s nothing like a symphony of reckoning disguised as the sounds of escapism; they sneak up on us and often enrich the way we conflate the coherence of a story with the consciousness of its telling.

Similarly, in Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, the wait for its well-publicised music disarmed me for its gut-punch sequences, which in turn allowed me to exist beyond the cynicism of judging a Hindi remake. Take the image of the Dalit hero, for instance, affectionately cradling the face of his upper-caste lover the second she mentions the death of her mother; he knows she’s trying to relate to him in her own naive way. Or take the shot of a dead student leader suddenly breaking the fourth wall and exposing the unsuspecting viewer’s complicity in the normalisation of bigotry. Or a girl’s feral scream to silence not only a violent spat but the whispers of society itself. The short-term effect conceals any long-term wrinkles the film has.

Besides Sitaare Zameen Par marking the return of family-friendly innocence in an age of communal intolerance, it’s a movie that commits to its excesses. All said and done, it’s hard to resist the empathy-is-victory message, the subversion of sports tropes, a superstar playing second fiddle, the spirited cast, the anti-ableist focus on having a ball rather than missing a basket. The preachiness of the Aamir Khan-starrer may not have worked for me, but its success cannot be begrudged. It worked for a majority of this country for the same reasons I was ‘defanged’ by a Saiyaara or a Metro... In Dino. When the crowd-pleasing parts came, the shortcomings receded into the background. If you’re in, you’re in. Conversely, if you’re not, the hype can be perplexing. There is no middle ground.

That’s another marker of this genre of mainstream entertainment: the reception is mixed, not divisive. It’s popular without being populist. At a time when movies thrive on the sort of toxic discourse that homogenises reactions and reframes the subjective difference of opinion as an objective rift in ideology, films like Saiyaara and its ilk reclaim the democracy of agreeing and disagreeing. Different responses are allowed to co-exist, without reflecting on the ‘moral’ character of the viewer. It becomes as simple — and civilised — as whether you connect with the film or not. It’s as easy as making a case, not proving your loyalty and undying belief. You dislike an Animal and your gender is questioned; you dislike an Uri and your patriotism is questioned; you dislike a Chhaava and your religious allegiances are questioned. But you like a Saiyaara or a Metro... In Dino and only your taste is (playfully) judged. The politicisation of feelings makes way for the personalisation of emotions.

It’s a fleeting reminder that, regardless of the intent of stories, listening need not have an agenda. Consuming them can be the same as being consumed by them. At the end of the day, the light that falls onto our faces in a dark hall can still be anything we imagine it to be. It doesn’t matter if we’re cranky film critics cheating on ourselves, serious cinephiles with a performative aversion to the mainstream, or regular moviegoers with regular perceptions and biases. When commercial film-making is done right, it gives us the freedom to start from square one without the baggage of influence. The urge to make others think and feel the way you do slowly disappears; all that remains is the first layer of attachment, which is private — and equal. After all, some watch to forget. Others rewatch to remember.