Rocky aur Rani, Murad & Safeena: Hindi films’ ‘It’ couple Ranveer-Alia’s onscreen chemistry is lit

Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt as Murad and Safeena in 'Gully Boy' (left) and as Rocky and Rani in 'Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani'.

Two of this generation’s finest actors, each representative of wildly contrasting personalities and styles, take on an unenviable task this week. Rocky and Rani, as they will be known for the foreseeable future, are tasked with carrying out of a bit of coup. They have to, against considerable odds, revive a genre everyone believes is dying. Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh come together this week in Karan Johar’s Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani, to pull off the unlikely feat of transporting us to the glitzy, larger-than-life Bollywood romance. And though assisted by the man who took this genre to dizzying heights in the '90s, they must do so against a wave of Hollywood heavyweights, and a comparatively grounded version of their own previous onscreen selves as 2019 Gully Boy’s Murad and Safeena.

Johar’s Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani, comes at a time when lathery versions of love and romance have been replaced by self-serious examinations of relationships. Marriage, previously the culmination of a spiky battle for consent and agreement, has now become the sight of woe and cultural dissection. Mainstream actors and actresses, including the recent pairings of Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor, Kartik Aaryan and Kiara Advani, have married first and discovered love later. The old trope of love-struck youngsters, pining for the adulation and approval of their stubborn families sounds as dated as the very idea of infatuation and attraction acting as the cornerstone of purpose. In Luv Ranjan’s Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar (2023), in fact, its life’s other purposes that actually get in the way of romance. But in Rocky and Rani kii Prem Kahani, Bhatt and Singh manage to sell both chemistry and unwinding deliriousness that powers our romantic fantasies.

Both Bhatt and Singh are generational talents. Actors who have little left to prove, except to maybe their own previous selves. In Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy, Murad and Safeena embody two contrasting types that play off each other’s shades. While Murad is the contemplative and restrained underdog, Safeena deals with the shackles around her, by digging her teeth into them. Murad quietly works towards a sense of belonging, while Safeena, bullishly invokes her right to ownership. In one scene, she smashes a woman in the head with a bottle, all because she feels her territory taken. “Bohat badi gundi hai na tu?” Murad asks, bemused but also aware.

In Johar’s latest, the roles are somewhat reversed. Murad has turned into the muscular, unhidden Rocky who literally wears his gut on his muscular frame. Rani, though tenacious, is far more eloquent and controlled than Safeena. Johar’s film isn’t just trying to rewrite the chemistry between these two actors, but is also trying to transport them to a place from where Murad and Safeena, their class-induced doggedness looks like a distant memory. Here the concerns are far more bureaucratic, and privileged so to speak. Singh and Bhatt manage to tie them to an emotional engine still.

A Johar film usually comes with its heavy-duty caveats. It’ll be loud, gushy, and ecstatic in the best and worst ways possible. Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani, is a spicy battle between intellect and bodily intensity, between the culture of studying and the culture of saying, and while it has always elicited interesting results — remember Vicky Donor (2012) — it is being trialled on a public that maybe no longer cares. This is, after all, the age of right-swipes, instantaneous dating and immediate rejection. The stakes have never been lower, in a sense, and, yet, Johar, Singh and Bhatt sort of pull off the impossible. All because they are easily the finest at what they do.

Bhatt has already done something similar with 2 States (2014). Ranveer Singh might be playing the beefy, bone-headed gym type for the first time, but this isn’t exactly alien territory. Which gives this film a sense of jeopardy, that might also become its unrecorded assist. In the year’s biggest Hindi film yet — Pathaan — the greatest chemistry possibly existed between the two men fighting for their own warped ideas of a motherland. Deepika Padukone was flashy and effective, but more so as a self-sustaining monolith, as opposed to the tail end of a romantic thread. It symbolises, somewhat, the decline of romance as the language of our Oedipal myths. It might just be the vacuum that Rocky and Rani look engineered to fill.

In Murad and Safeena, we saw a more municipal, understated version of love. The kind of romance that yearns for truth rather than cinematic gloss. In Johar’s imagination, the grammar changes, as extravagance replaces sobriety, expression replaces silence. There’s the snowy slopes, the mansions, the designer clothing, the conceit of luxury and therefore escape. It’s the cinema we have grown up on, and, perhaps, in the last half decade grown over. Rocky and Rani Kii Prem Kahani might still reap the benefits of a blockbuster July, where movie-going has returned to a point where cinema can actually feel assured, maybe even bullish about its prospects. But while it is unlikely to resurrect an entire genre, it looks set to, thanks to stellar leading performances, re-arrange if not rejuvenate, the great Bollywood ‘Prem Kahani’. More so, it sustains the myth of a Rocky and Rani, for every Murad and Safeena that we know of.