‘Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan’ movie review: The eyes don’t have it

The candied contrivances and poetic overkill in this Vikrant Massey, Shanaya Kapoor-starrer romance become exhausting

A title like Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan spells trouble. It signals the surge of poetry about to overwhelm the screen. Conversations, voiceovers, song lyrics — everything is tuned to Radio Metaphor in Santosh Singh’s romantic drama. “She saw me not with sight, but insight,” says the hero, a visually-impaired man, of his beloved. A beat later: pyaar andha hota hai (love is blind). The film’s obsession with sight-based metaphors and poetic punning becomes... a blind spot.

They meet on the train to Dehra. Jahaan (Vikrant Massey) is a musician and a songwriter, low on inspiration, seeking a creative reset in the hills. The passenger opposite him, in the coupe, is Saba (Shanaya Kapoor), a theatre artiste wanting to break into Hindi films. She’s wearing a blindfold (it’s prep for an important audition, she says) and has resolved not to remove it till the end of her trip. Since her manager bailed at the last minute, Saba has to travel alone and unattended. This means two things: 1) method acting, not family connections, is clearly the key to Bollywood. 2) Saba doesn’t realise that her co-passenger, with whom she’s struck up a lively rapport, is not a sighted person. Curiously, Jahaan plays along.

It’s here, at this early juncture, that the film departs from its slender source material, a famous Ruskin Bond short story called ’The Eyes Have It’. The protagonist in Bond’s story made a harmless game of his subterfuge, a minor pastime to be indulged on trains. Jahaan, though, is in for the long haul, as Saba joins him in Mussoorie and bunkers down in his stay. There is a near-accident. There is dancing in the rain. There’s a kiss. And then, on the threshold of love, he’s gone.

‘Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan’ (Hindi)

Director: Santosh Singh
Cast: Vikrant Massey, Shanaya Kapoor, Zain Khan Durrani
Run-time: 140 minutes
Storyline: In this romance, a visually impaired man falls for a stranger, withholding the fact of his condition

Some romances have a limited elasticity — stretch them too far and they snap in your hand. For all their awkwardness, the scenes in Mussoorie have an underlying sweetness and warmth, with merry stops at maggi and sunset points, Massey and Kapoor not as erroneously mismatched as their ages might suggest. Kapoor, making her debut, is relaxed and confident for the most part, though her crying game is strictly a B-minus (it falls behind cousin Janhvi.)

Indeed, this becomes a problem when the film leaps ahead three years, to Europe, with a lot of weeping and yearning taking over the plot. We follow Saba’s winter of discontent, as Jahaan re-enters her life by blind chance (sorry) and tips it over. The auditing of emotions reaches a fever pitch, with big, Bhansali-like ideas weighing down on this modest film. There is no modesty in Vishal Mishra’s soundtrack, of course — a full-tilt concert of coolly curated anguish.

The last time Vikrant Massey hung around trains, we got a propaganda film. The actor is in more agreeable form here, playing a flopping-haired savant with a guitar, intoning words like ‘taiyaari’ and ‘tarakii’ with the appropriate poetic flourish. For a second, I thought back to Lootera, Massey’s first film, and how his precise line-readings would light up scenes alongside Ranveer Singh. Over a decade later, Massey has cracked Bollywood. But Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is not his Lootera, far from it. “Stardom works but talent flies,” Saba says. I donno.

Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan is currently running in theatres