Aarav (Lakshya) and his wife, Chandni (Ananya Panday), are cracking under the strain of caring for a newborn. Their frustrations boil over into an ugly yelling match. Aarav grabs her face. He’s motionless for a few seconds, then backs away, mortified. She runs into the other room and balls up in a corner, shaking in shock as he begs her to open the door.
The moment when Aarav grabs Chandni is in the film's trailer. I think it’s there because Dharma doesn’t mind giving the impression that this will be an ‘intense’ love story in the key of Sandeep Vanga or the Anand L Rai/Dhanush collaborations. Yet, Chand Mera Dil is nothing like those films, treating the brief physical contact with utter seriousness. Aarav is immediately contrite, but it doesn’t matter. The entire story turns on this moment. PSA films like Thappad are lauded for presenting characters who won't stand for any kind of abuse, but Chand Mera Dil is equally steadfast without resorting to moral grandstanding.
Vivek Soni’s film opens with Aarav, freshly graduated from a university in Michigan, returning to his engineering college in Hyderabad for an alumni meet. We’re whisked back to a few years earlier, with Aarav joining college and immediately falling for self-assured Chandni. She likes him too, but plays it cool until she realises he won’t make the first move. Their hookup and ensuing romance is a fluid half hour, casually sexy, scored wall-to-wall by Sachin-Jigar. There’s an unbroken shot with the camera following him as he follows her, the circular walk picked up by another Aarav and Chandni, and then another—a sweet rendering of the dream logic of courtship, and also an indication of who the leader in this relationship will be.
Chand Mera Dil is perceptive about how past traumas bleed into our current relationships. When Chandni discovers she’s pregnant, her first instinct is to abort. But as someone who’s been denied love all her life, the sense of connection she feels is too strong, and she decides she not to give up the child. Months later, the same baby cries as Aarav pleads with his wife from the side of a frosted glass door. Chandni—who grew up in a violent, toxic home—looks up and sees his silhouette grabbing hers. It’s her imagining what the child might've seen. And that’s enough to make up her mind.
On the heels of the insipid Ek Din, it felt good to see a romantic drama rendered with some force and conviction. Soni, who co-wrote the film with Akshat Ghildial and Tushar Paranjape, makes up in enthusiastic staging what he lacks in subtlety. He packs the film with simple metaphors for a rocky relationship—flickering tube lights, hissing kettles, cracked eggs. There’s a bit of Mani Ratnam in the lush framing and the occasional shaky cam—not surprising for a story that so resembles Alai Payuthey (2000). The film’s palette has an Instagram-y quality (there’s no reason Aarav’s apartment should have Paharganj lighting), but at this point I’ll take any Hindi film that isn’t an active eyesore.
Even amidst the mayhem of Kill, Lakshya—tough-looking but with a gentle, woozy voice—struck me as someone who might one day play a romantic lead. He pairs well with Panday, who, within her wheel house, is one of the better Hindi actors today. Soni sometimes burdens them with overcooked drama, the worst being a dinner ambush by their respective parents (a big problem in the film is everyone but the central couple is sketchily written). But mostly, the two leads make their characters’ messiness, a volatile mixture of duty, resentment, hurt and longing, both understandable and empathetic.
With audiences today primed to respond to irony and posturing, it’s tough for films that leave themselves open and vulnerable. I knew Ek Din was doomed when couples in the hall snickered at the height of the drama; similarly, the way people leaned forward in the last act of Saiyaara seemed to signal the film’s success. Chand Mera Dil elicited a more measured reaction from the audience I saw it with. It's not the subtlest film, or the most sensible. But in a time of snark, I appreciated the swoon: the literal sparks that fly in the scene at the police station; the torrential storm at the end rattling Aarav and Chandni's constructed selves; the way one and then the other, at two key junctures in the story, sink to their knees, in the same instinctive gesture of profound relief.
‘Chand Mera Dil’ is in theatres.
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