It’s the Bollywood equivalent of a wedding where the food is cold, the speeches are endless, and the bride and groom are clearly exhausted. You want to have fun. The decorations insist you are having fun. But deep down, you’re just counting the minutes until you can leave.
Let’s talk about the music, because it’s both the film’s greatest asset and its most damning indictment. The soundtrack— Gulaabo , Shaam Shaandaar , Senti Wali Feeling —is a masterclass in textured, euphoric pop. Amit Trivedi’s production is lush, quirky, and addictive. For weeks before the release, these songs were the soundtrack to a generation’s monsoon.
What audiences got instead was a cinematic insomnia cure: a film so tonally bewildering, so narratively inert, that it became less a romantic comedy and more a case study in what happens when style cannibalizes substance. shaandaar -2015-
In the annals of Bollywood’s ambitious misfires, Shaandaar occupies a unique, almost dreamlike space. Directed by Vikas Bahl on the heels of the universally adored Queen (2013), and reuniting the effervescent Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt after their hit Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania , the film arrived with the weight of a blockbuster wedding band. Its marketing was a blitz of pastel colors, destination wedding glamour, and a thumping, chart-topping soundtrack by Amit Trivedi. It promised shaandaar —magnificent—fun.
Watch the music video for Gulaabo . Then take a nap. You’ll have experienced the best of Shaandaar without the 144-minute wedding hangover. It’s the Bollywood equivalent of a wedding where
Aesthetically, Shaandaar is a marvel. Ayananka Bose’s cinematography bathes every frame in a cotton-candy palette—powder blues, blush pinks, mint greens. Poland has never looked more like a Wes Anderson daydream. But the visual perfection becomes oppressive. It’s a wedding album with no guests, a cake with no sugar. The emptiness of the frame mirrors the emptiness of the plot. The film is so obsessed with being shaandaar on the surface that it forgets to build a single scene with genuine stakes. When the climax arrives—a slapdash, low-energy resolution—you feel not joy, but relief.
The premise is deceptively simple: Alia’s Alia (yes, the character is also named Alia) is a insomniac heiress. Shahid’s Jagjinder Joginder—aka JJ—is a graphic designer who also suffers from sleeplessness, hired to plan her lavish wedding in Poland. They meet cute in an airport and bond over their shared, existential alertness at 3 AM. The film’s central metaphor—finding love in the loneliest, most awake hours—is genuinely lovely. For about twenty minutes, Shaandaar hums with offbeat promise. But deep down, you’re just counting the minutes
Shaandaar isn’t a failure of talent. It’s a failure of vision—a film that confused aesthetic excess for emotional truth. It remains, years later, a fascinating, beautiful, and utterly exhausting nap.