Taking a look back at the underrated Akaash Vani, which released 12 years ago. Kartik Aaryan was a revelation in the film directed by Luv Ranjan that also featured the wonderful Nushrat Bharucha.
This is Kartik Aryan’s most honest performance. Luv Ranjan’s screenplay takes the lovers from the corny escapades and frigid philosophizing of the college campus to the precipice of heartbreak. Sudhir K Chaudhuri’s fluid camerawork vividly manifests the journey, which is made with ample feeling and remarkable restraint.
Unlike other contemporary celluloid raconteurs, Ranjan is not fearful of silences. He doesn’t fill up every conceivable nook and corner of the storytelling with words and music, though I must state here that Hitesh Sonik’s background music and the songs in the later part of the film go a long way in building an appealing case for the lead pair’s star-crossed relationship. If Akaash and Vani seem so lost without each other, it’s a lot to do with the way their emotions are pinned down by the words and the music that underline the course of their togetherness.
In Luv Ranjan’s underrated Akaash Vani, one of the high dramatic moments shot on a small deserted railway station in the night, the film’s protagonists, now estranged by an unfortunate series of circumstances, sit on the bench and…well, they sob.
Yes, they simply cry their hearts out—first, the girl. Then, in a melancholic celebration of the me-too syndrome, the boy, now alas no longer a boy (and he smokes to prove it), also breaks into little sobs that build up into a wail as the shehnai, indicative of a cruel marital joke, plays in the background. The sequence in the hands of a lesser director would have fallen flat on its sobbing face.
On many occasions, Ranjan allows the lead pair to share silences, a rarity in today’s cinema, where it is presumed that the average moviegoer has the attention span of a sparrow looking for twigs before the rain starts pelting down. There are long meditative stretches of simple non-verbal communication between the protagonists. It’s a risk to allow audiences to get restive, but a risk worth taking.
Ranjan’s lovers come across as people who do what they do not to impress others but simply because their heart tells them to behave the way they are shown. Both the lead actors are extremely effective in showing their character’s inner world. Though the film belongs to the female protagonist, Kartik manages to hold his own with an endearing performance far removed from what he attempted in the director’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama. Though there are patches of aridity in the relationship (what was Akaash doing while Vani was suffering in malfunctional domesticity?), this is a very good film about a bad marriage or what havoc a wrong decision about one’s life can create. To his credit director Luv Ranjan is able to hold the lovers’ predicament in place. He has a keen eye for the inner life of his protagonists. Their inner turmoil is palpable and urgent.
Luv Ranjan has the punch-filled boys-will-be-boys saga Pyaar Ka Punchnama behind him, proving his solid grip on the grammar of the hearts of the young and the confused.
Seldom since Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Hum…Dil De Chuke Sanam have we wished so intently to see two people in love to be united. Ranjan quietly sucks us into the story of Akaash and Vani. Suffused in contemplative silences and deriving its dramatic energy from the age-old debate on arranged versus love marriages, Akaash Vani is thoughtful and absorbing, not prone to tripping over with nervous anxiety and excessive energy to hold our attention.
The world of Akaash Vani is far removed from the bantering bawdy backchat of Pyaar Ka Punchnama. But that is the beauty of the second film. It tells you that the director is not frozen in his incipient world.
