This movie will leave a lasting impression in a particular part of your memory, and you'll remember the movie through its deep portrayal, of what the pain of loss can do to a person. The movie takes a journey from what looks like an ordinary life, flirting between a girl and a boy, to the sorrowful depths of how loss of a loved one can look like and how a person takes the path of an inner journey to cope with it. Many critics and people have been whining over one same thing though, they say "how can anybody be madly in love, when their relationship has not fully developed into this mad, passionate love in the screenplay when Laila is forced to marry someone else, how come Qais and Laila are so hyper and how come Qais becomes Majnu because of this ordinary looking, under-developed love story, short of all the madness that Majnu actually shows in the second half, why did he become so mad passionate when we didn't even see any mad, passionate chemistry between the two before Laila's marriage. Let me tell you how it works; Laila and Majnu have deep feelings for each other already, they are falling in love, they have already started the journey of mutual attachment, but they haven't anticipated this painful fate of separation yet. But when two such people suddenly realize that they could get separated from each other forever, and this sudden realization of the strong circumstances of losing each other forever, makes them realize that they want each other more than ever. That's when they start the fight to be with each other. Hope you get it now, people! This thing is very common that ordinary people experience in real life, I don't know the fuss critics have created over this aspect of story.
Apart from this, any number of words of praise are less to describe Avinash Tiwari's acting. He deserves good directors like Imitiaz Ali, who make him use his full acting potential. Two scenes from the movie might stay with you forever; 1-When Qais realizes that Laila is in the same Tea shop that he is sitting in, he gets so deeply engrossed in pain and all his sadness just resurfaces in that scene, while he gets up and is leaving the cafe, almost on the verge of an emotional breakdown. 2- When he faints seeing Laila after so many years. Many people may say how can somebody just faint like that. But this scene has justified the depths of what trauma looks like. He is in chronic depression already and when he encounters the main subject of his life that drove him to this depth of pain and sorrow, he gets so overwhelmed that his mind cannot take the shock of seeing his lost love again, it is the mixture of shock, happiness and trauma that shuts him down in that moment.
At last, I would say, I wish this movie went to film festivals, it is a cult movie in this subject, there's other love story movie that can portray pain in such beautiful, soulful and deep interpretation of how we design our own idea of love in our head. It is not just about what happens in the world, but also how a person'a inner journey takes him to his own definition of what love could be. Ultimately, Majnu realizes that for him, Laila is eternally present in his thoughts, and almost inseparable in his own world.
