Movie Rewind | Lootera: Ranveer Singh at his gentlest, luminous Sonakshi Sinha in a fragile dance of love and loss

The sounds are vivid in Lootera.

Every little clink of the anklets can be heard. The tweeting of the birds in abject silence, the quiet breezes, gusts of wind and the rustling of canvases. 

While the musical scores are untouchable of course, the story creates its atmospheric setting of the 1950s through just the movements of people, cars.

It’s quiet enough for you to hear the sounds of heartbreak. 

The first half of the film, set in the green town of Manikpur, is filled with the sounds of first love. And the second half, the story moves to the loneliness of Dalhousie. 

You don’t hear the sounds of anklets in Dalhousie. And soon, the very stillness that felt like peace earlier, begins to sound suffocating.

Lootera, directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, adapted from the tale of The Last Leaf, is gentle, and yet so cruel, to its own characters. The story revolves around the effervescent, bright-eyed Pakhi (A gorgeous Sonakshi Sinha), living in Manikpur, with her father, a wealthy landlord.

They encounter a man named Varun (Ranveer Singh), who claims to be an archaeologist. Reserved and constrained, he wishes to study the land that surrounds the temple that the landlord owns. He is welcomed into their home and hearth, along with his friend Dev, (Vikrant Massey, in what seems to be in another lifetime). Pakhi is enamoured and attracted to him immediately, and an affection builds between the two of them. 

Hope flavours the first half of the film, as the two enjoy time together over art and literature. The rushes of first love reflect in the scenes where Pakhi enters his room, wears his jacket and hat. She even looks through his cigarettes, as she tries to understand the man that she has fallen in love with. 

And then, right before the wedding, betrayal rips through the story. Varun isn’t the man Pakhi believed he was, and he’s gone. The colour, literally drains from Pakhi’s life as we move from the lush vibrance of Manikpur to the sudden greyness of Dalhousie. Pakhi doesn’t wear the gorgeous sarees with gold borders anymore. The earrings are missing. There’s hardly the red bindi now. 

She is wrapped in shawls, struggling with grief and tuberculosis. The sounds of the coughs gradually become more violent. Sonakshi is stellar here: Her eyes are hollow and dank; unrecognisable, compared to the bubbly Pakhi we had once known.

Once again, she meets Varun and he is to stay at her house: But this time, he isn’t a guest. He’s a fugitive. And slowly, she warms up to him again, with both knowing that their days are numbered in different ways. Yet, a frail hope still exists, and it’s in the form of the falling leaves on a tree, and Varun, repentant for the life that he could have had with her, decides to fulfil her last wish. And it all depends on a leaf. 

To say that Ranveer and Sonakshi are absolutely heartbreaking in this film, doesn’t do justice to their performances. They twist the knife slowly, lingering in every silence and unfinished sentence.

They both carry the power of the  said words and the unsaid, especially in the final conversation between Pakhi and Varun, where she tearfully asks him, if he ever loved her. He makes the confession that he should’ve made before, berating himself for his mistakes. Ranveer is stellar as the man who is succumbing to both a physical gunshot wound, as well as the emotional ones of his own sins. As the wound grows deeper, it incapacitates him further, leaving him to a cold reality that he can no longer escape.

Lootera is a painful love story, with a touch of bittersweet. It’s the tragedy of first love, the defining choices one makes, and the brutality of consequences. Hope does arrive, true; it’s not miraculous as one would believe, but maybe, just maybe, it gives you the will to live for another day.

Or maybe, hope can persist. Till the last leaf falls down.