“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said William Shakespeare. And in an average Hindi film, it often is too tortuous, if not torturous. ‘Chand Mera Dil’, the title, promises a film high on the gossamer shades of romance. Only, as the film opens, for a long time, the only shades you see are the matching colours of our hero and heroine’s outfits. Love-struck Aarav (Lakshya Lalwani) starts twinning with Chandni (Ananya Panday). Obviously, his outfit shade card — ranging from neon and fluorescent yellow to pinks — not only matches her clothes but catches her attention too.
Presto, the two engineering college students fall in love and are in equal hurry to get out of those twinning outfits. Unwed pregnancy is certainly not a bold issue in 2026. So, what’s new in this modern-age love story? To be honest, very little. For a long time, the film feels like a lesson on marital responsibility masquerading as a love story. Atypical love lessons are all too welcome (Gen Z could certainly use them), only if they capture our imagination.
Somewhere in the background runs the backstory of our heroine, whose mother had been a victim of domestic abuse. Since we are living in times when monstrous cases of violence against women are making national headlines, what sane person can dispute the relevance of respect in a man-woman relationship? Here, though the film tries to be socially correct from a gender perspective, one forgets one’s gender and ends up empathising more with the man in distress. The heroine’s agony, despite her ‘cry alone moments’, gets a bit lost amid a cushy job and the presence of a new man. Singer-actor Paresh Pahuja is introduced as her colleague and love interest. In limited screen time, he makes the cut.
The problem with writer-director Vivek Soni, who has had a hit-and-miss record in the past, is that he misses more this time. While in ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’, his intent and feminist core were mostly on point, here we don’t know what he wants to say or convey. Hence, the confusion rubs off on his characters too. To be fair, Lakshya does his level best to make the most of Aarav and brings the right degree of vulnerability as well as intensity to the part. But the actor we so loved in ‘Kill’ and ‘Ba…ds of Bollywood’ can’t make us fall in love with this film. Ananya, too, is quite impressive and lends maturity, dignity and heart to Chandni, a woman of today who will not take any nonsense from her man, least of all disrespect.
But since the film’s heart misses more than a beat, we, like its director who doesn’t know which lane to pick, don’t quite grasp what to make of it. The music is by Sachin-Jigar, but the songs that keep playing every now and then in the background are not the film’s USP.
“Pyaar mein thoda pagal hona padta hai…” Should you be mad enough to watch ‘Chand Mera Dil’ in theatres? It suffices to say that it doesn’t whip up any ‘dil toh pagal hai’ kind of feelings. By the time it reaches the climax, you just want the lead players to get over with the expected formalities.
Romance clearly is not every filmmaker’s genre. Who knows this better than Karan Johar, the producer of the film? Missteps are a given in any love story, but Soni’s idea of romance is rather off-key, and you don’t feel the glow of either Chand or Chandni.
So give us a ‘Saiyaara’ any day, or even a KJo variant of romance. The mushy popcorn romance from the house of Dharma Productions is infinitely better than its foray into these ‘rozmarra’ problems that come with love’s inevitable offshoot.
Behind closed doors, the Central Board of Film Certification cut a 96-second lip-lock in the film. We are tempted to censor the unflattering dialogue, “he is a regular boy”, which Chandni’s friend uses to describe Aarav. The fault here does not lie with the stars of the movie, but with the vision and execution of the director. Lakshya, you are in no way regular, certainly not as Aarav; you only deserved a better film.
