Manmarziyaan is way more real than Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. It's all about how we love and lust
Whoever told you your real happiness lies in the happiness of your beloved, even if the person is not with you, for sure never loved, not deeply enough, not passionately enough.
Yes, you should learn to move on but seeing the person you love, love someone else (madly, deeply all over again) slows down your moving on process, if not completely stop it.
Countless movies have told us a lie: It is possible to smile through your tears on seeing your 'ex' happy in the arms of someone else. If anything, it can only make you howl in pain.
The large hearts who give off the hands of their partners to 'the real love' of their lives are fictional characters — as fictional as Harry Potter and Dumbledore themselves.
When we love, we strive to get love. 'Ek tarfa pyaar' that Karan Johar tried to romanticise in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is as much a flight of fantasy as the denial of nepotism in Bollywood.
And this is where Manmarziyaan steals the show and tells us how raw and real people love and lust.
A lot many people have drawn comparisons between Manmarziyaan and Hum Dil Chuke Sanam and countless movies where 'sacrificing in love' was confused with 'sacrificing love' itself.
Movies that made us judge love. Make us think over why one person's love was better than the other's, deliberate over who deserves the girl or the guy more in plots that wove love triangles.
Those movies do not reflect us. Because we love enough to fight the battles that our heart tells us must be fought.
A Salman Khan giving away his fiancé's hands to Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai leaves us happy because we rooted for Kajol to walk the aisle with Shah Rukh.
In real life, that doesn't happen. A real life Salman would have tried to tell a real life Kajol (through words and actions) why he was a better choice for her than a real life Shah Rukh. That real life Salman would also try to manipulate the Kajol in his life.
This is precisely what Robbie (Abhishek Bachchan) does in Manmarziyaan. He tries both hook and crook to get what his heart falls for.
He doesn't travel with his wife to figure out who she loves. He goes on a honeymoon to make his wife understand the depths of his own love.
And that is why any comparison between Manmarziyaan's Robbie with Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam's Vanraj (Ajay Devgn) or Kuch Kuch Hota Hai's Aman (Salman Khan) is actually comparing fact with fiction. Manmarziyaan is fact, the sacrifice of love that we have seen so far in movies is bland fiction.
Robbie is us, so is Rumi (Tapsee Pannu), and so is Vicky (Vicky Kaushal). They love with abandon, they lust like humans, they fight to love and lust the person they choose. And they all play fair and foul at the same time.
They are careless lovers but they are also insecure lovers because they are not the figment of the writer's imagination but the portrayal of us as real life lovers.
Robbie is no maryada purushottam. He is very much the guy next door who has flown to America for a bright future and come back looking for a girl to marry.
He wants to marry a person who he knows is moving heaven and earth to marry someone else. And yet he waits on the sidelines for one love story to fail for his to take off. He also tries within his limited capacity to change the script of Rumi's love story.
Countless people have waited for divine intervention to strike when their ex was getting married till the very last day, to the very last moment. They have not joined the party to celebrate the opening of a new chapter in their ex's life. Because love drives you to seek and get what the heart craves for.
Manmarziyaan gives us ache, slowly rips us apart, and then leaves us nourished with a dose of real life wisdom. Love is selfish because selfish is human.
Yet another sign that our movies now reflect us — bare and brutal, flawed and perfect — all at the same time.
Also read: Why the heroine is the hero in Anurag Kashyap's Manmarziyaan