There’s this really quirky advertisement which comes on TV where a man asks the ticket guy at a multiplex if he can give him some discount because the film has already started inside. If you were to apply the same logic to Raanjhanaa, you would only have to pay two-third of the ticket price. Maybe even half if you can bargain well.

Really, what was that last one hour? Was it from the same film? After pulling you inside in its world and making you fall in love with the characters, Aanand L. Rai’s second film loses its body and soul in the search of a destination. Till then the flow is organic and addictively so.

The charm of Raanjhanaa, baked from the same dough as Aanand’s first feature Tanu Weds Manu, is in the celebration of a small-town romance. Here it’s the story of Kundan, played by south superstar Dhanush in his Bollywood debut, who is the son of a Benaras pandit and who falls truly, madly, deeply in love — not really in that order — with the neighbourhood girl Zoya (Sonam Kapoor).

The impossibility of a Hindu-Muslim coupling would raise its ugly head but more importantly the girl would go on to brush it off as a school adventure. No such luck for the boy who waits for her to return from Delhi and restart from where they had left off. He had slit his veins then and he still roams around with a blade. In case he needs to shed blood again.

Lekin “mohalla ke laundon ka pyaar doctor engineer hamesha utha ke le jaata hai”. Here he is a student politician, played by, as the trailer must have alerted you, Abhay Deol. He is the man Zoya is ready to slit her veins for. The man she fell in love with on the Delhi campus. Now the action would move back to the holy city where the unholy trinity would come together for some marital action.

Now, all this happens in the first half. The electric, emotionally charged, rainbow-struck first half. It is when the shocker comes early into the second half that Raanjhanaa doesn’t know where to head. Left to pick up its own pieces, the film digs deeper into the world of politics, emerging into a very different film, belying the promise it had made in the first hour.

Throughout that far-better-handled first 80 minutes it is A.R. Rahman’s songs and score that Aanand best makes use of. With a sparse few spoken lines, he cuts to these elaborate montages to Rahman’s music, exuding everything from the first attraction to the falling in love to the heartbreak. Thanks to the glorious soundtrack, there is an automatic attachment of epicness to the proceedings.

The presence of Dhanush helps. Taking a dig at his own looks at the very start, he actually uses his physicality brilliantly to create this impetuous and impish boy who can go to any lengths to get his girl. He’s street-smart yes and even vindictive, but beyond his machinations, the honesty and innocence shine through. And it’s infectious enough for you to root for him. That too over Abhay.

Sonam looks like the girl who can create such crazy flutters in the hearts of two very different men from two very different backgrounds. But her performance is uneven, often lacking the intensity of the other actors or the film. No wonder when an important character dies in the film, they had to cut to Dhanush’s reaction to mask her reaction. Or the lack of it.

The real stars of Raanjhanaa, though, are the actors who play Kundan’s friends — Swara Bhaskar as the hopelessly lovelorn Bindiya and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as the no-nonsense Murari.

You get a feeling why Rahman would have taken up this project. There’s a strong spiritual tone to the subject and his songs evoke them in all their magic and melody. Raanjhanaa wouldn’t have been a shadow of the film it is without his music.

There’s a lot of heart in the way Aanand Rai tells a story but maybe sometimes he should rein in his characters and not let them take him away from the heart of the story. It’s about picking that one right road tum tak. Tum tak… tum tak…