Chand Mera Dil strives to tell a familiar Bollywood love story in a more grounded, emotionally realistic mode. In this regard, director Vivek Soni has directed the film, starring Ananya Panday and Lakshya as young lovers struggling with love, adolescence, adult life, responsibilities, and heartache.
Ultimately, the film has a structure for which Bollywood viewers are well familiar. A boy finds a girl, they fall in love, circumstances drive them apart, and fate keeps pulling them back towards each other. But Chand Mera Dil tries to remain different. It concentrates less on fantasy and more on the emotional exhaustion and sacrifices of a relationship, which are found in life.
The story begins in Michigan, USA, the day Aarav, played by Lakshya, receives a congratulatory phone call from Chandani on topping his college exams. The awkward conversation they have right off the bat gives you an indication as to whether something's going awry between the two of them.
Then the story jumps back into flashback mode and brings audiences back to Hyderabad in 2017, when the two first met while at college. For Aarav, it is love at first sight. He silently admires Chandani from a distance before she eventually initiates their first conversation. What ensues is a dreamy romance that includes endless texting, long conversations, and youthful flirting that feels like just the thrill of a first love.
Vivek Soni spends a lot of time creating this romantic world, allowing the audience a lovely and atmospheric ambience, alongside emotive music and comforting cinematography. We see the average college heartthrob on stage, who is just called Lakshya’s Aarav, as confident, stylish, and emotionally intense, and it is not easy for Ananya’s Chandani's calm, traditional, and emotionally grounded presence to fit together.
Their chemistry is particularly lively at times on film in a relaxed romantic context and on screen. The film dabbles occasionally in the kinds of super tense and cringey dialogues, however, often in a way that would not suit all viewers. The true power of Chand Mera Dil comes about once the stage of romance is over and the two start to really pick up the weight of grown-up life.
Family disapproval, money, studies, career struggles, and burnout gradually seep into their courtship. Rather than romanticising love as a magic phenomenon, love hurts in real life. This realism becomes the greatest strength of the film. Aarav isn’t portrayed as a perfect hero ready to destroy the world for love; Chandani isn’t depicted as a person without agency.
They commit blunders, feel frustration, deal with ego, and act on choices that represent development as opposed to romanticised melodrama. Ananya Panday has done a very mature performance in recent years. Her portrayal of Chandani is one of restraint and emotional stability, particularly in the final moments of the film when the character grows into an independent woman creating her life. Lakshya skillfully gets into both Aarav’s emotional decline and regrets about losing the relationship while unable to fully find his way following a breakup.
The director Vivek Soni deserves credit for keeping several problematic romantic themes common in Bollywood films at bay. The movie avoids toxic possessiveness and misogynistic “love at any cost” storytelling. It instead gives both characters dignity and allows them individual emotional journeys to make their own lives.
Despite its good points, the film is also clearly messy in places. It has stretches in some scenes, it has some emotional beats that become repetitive, and it gets slower at times. But that messiness at some points also reflects the randomness of real-life relationships. Love is seldom tidy or cinematic.
And visually, the movie is attractive, particularly for its college romance moments. The Hyderabad location provides warmth and familiarity, and the passage to adult life is deliberately a little duller, emotionally heavier because so much is being written about the characters’ own shifting reality.
Finally, Chand Mera Dil is really the winner not only because it realizes modern partnerships have lost so much of a great deal of romantic grand gestures. But they are also about emotional labour, concessions, lost chances, missed opportunities, individual ambition and timing.
Though it may not entirely reinvent the romance genre, it provides a refreshingly real treatment of how love changes when life begins taking centre stage. That’s the kind of relationship drama that is more than just a dream movie for anybody looking for a glossy but emotionally focused exploration of romance. For anyone wanting something deeper and more vulnerable, Chand Mera Dil is a relationship drama with a love story as true to life as any you could ask for, and it is a realistic drama to watch.
