He counts the numbers of steps she walks from the bus stop to her home in the chawl. She counts the number of missing buttons in his shirts and holes in his vest. East or ‘vest', Shiva and Astha, played by two enormously talented newcomers Meezaan and Sharmin, are diehard romantics, the kind that would easily die for love.
There is a purity of the heart and a sublimity of the soul in this love story, a remake of the beautiful but melodramatic Tamil hit '7G Rainbow Colony'. 'Malaal' wins you over not by being persuasive but simply letting the love grow organically from its natural environment, in this case a Mumbai chawl shot with a glowing, raging but restrained passion by cinematographer Ragul Dharuman who sees a glimmer of hope in every shot but refuses to romanticise squalor just to amplify the sentimental value of the story.
The courtship, love and what ensues between the couple thereafter is captured in gentle waves of empathetic exuberance, as though director Mangesh Hadawale wants to believe in the feasibility of love to heal all hurt, as much as we do.
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The young actors playing the lovers are so fresh, appealing and unshackled by guilt, we are gradually swept into the rites of their romance: the initial rebuffs by the girl, including a humiliating stalking allegation in a bus where the passengers thrash the boy. Meezaan's Shiva More takes it all in his stride, the snubs, the fleeting kindness, the sheer challenge of convincing the girl he's convinced he loves for life, and beyond.
The scenes between Meezaan and Sharmin are beautifully detailed and nuanced. Sanjay Leela Bhansali's music goes a long way in conferring the courtship and passion with a resolute realism. It is so rare and precious, as one gets sucked into a world of spiritual romance where the bodies become irrelevant the way they rarely do in love-making scenes of India cinema.