Defamiliarizing Love: Saiyaara and A Moment to Remember through Shklovsky’s Lens

Viktor Shklovsky taught that art must “make objects unfamiliar,” shaking us from the automaton of perception. In cinema, this defamiliarization (ostransenie) can turn even the most familiar love story into something new and startling. When a couple’s first kiss or a simple song lyric is framed as if seen for the very first time, we pause and feel its strangeness. Such is the power at work in Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara (2025) and John H. Lee’s A Moment to Remember (2004): two romantic dramas that use memory, time, and silence to estrange the everyday. Both revolve around a young wife’s early-onset Alzheimer’s and her husband’s devotion, but each film’s tone, editing, and narrative rhythm make us truly re-perceive love, loss, and memory. In these films, the director’s craft — from lingering silences to abrupt emotional beats — breaks our cinematic habits and makes the familiar pulse with fresh intensity.

“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’… to increase the difficulty and length of perception”.

This is Shklovsky’s creed, and it underlies the gentle, uneasy beauty of both Saiyaara and A Moment to Remember. On the surface, Saiyaara (Hindi for Wandering Star) is a Yash Raj musical romance of a volatile young musician and a shy poet. It follows them as they fall in love through shared music and poetry, only to have Vaani (Aneet Padda) diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. A Moment to Remember, its South Korean progenitor, tells a similar story of Su-jin (Son Ye-jin) and Chul-soo (Jung Woo-sung) overcoming class differences and then facing her memory loss. Both films pivot on a loved one fading away, forcing the viewer to experience daily life as a series of fragments.

Embedding such a familiar tragedy in filmic form is already a defamiliarizing act: we are made to see the ordinary heartbreak of memory loss as though for the first time. Yet these directors go further, using editing, pacing, and sound to sharpen that effect. In Saiyaara, Mohit Suri “doesn’t follow the pattern of a perfect romance,” says one review — he leans into the pauses and faltering chords. Scenes often unfold with no grand gestures, just the hush between breaths. The film is “not a loud declaration of love. It’s a whisper, a confession buried beneath silences, a melody wrapped in hesitation.” It “breathes in its own time” instead of chasing the hurried pulse of the world. In other words, Saiyaara stretches perception: long, lingering shots and soft focus invites us to live in the moment-to-moment uncertainty of the characters. Every gaze that holds too long, every half-smile that trembles on the verge of tears, feels richly textured — familiar emotions become defamiliarized by their unhurried presentation. The film’s frames are described as “full of ink stains and crossed-out lines,” a visual metaphor that estranges the image of romance: here each shot looks “lived in, like it was waiting for someone to come and remember it”.

In Saiyaara, quiet moments replace spectacle. The heroine Vaani and hero Krish share long silences in candlelit rooms, letting their unspoken longing speak volumes.

In Saiyaara, silence and soft music carry emotional weight. The soundtrack is woven into the narrative so seamlessly that it “doesn’t underline moments; it becomes them”. There are no flashy Bollywood set pieces or dance breaks — instead just subtle chords echoing “like footsteps in an empty hallway”. Even the chemistry between the leads is earned in pauses. Reviewers note that their bond is “a mix of silences and unspoken longing”. This framing is Shklovsky’s defamiliarization at play: we are forced to slow down and feel the ache of love by the way it isn’t shown. A lingering shot of Vaani lost in memory, or of Krish standing alone in a dim concert hall (later the site of their wedding), makes the familiar image of a loving couple strangely distant.

By contrast, A Moment to Remember is more traditionally melodramatic on the surface, but it too uses structure to estrange. The third act is classic Korean tearjerker: Su-jin’s memory deteriorates, her husband Chul-soo quietly endures. But John H. Lee’s direction defamiliarizes this familiar plot through tight editing and narrative reversals. We see quick cuts between Su-jin forgetting and old flashbacks of the couple, so each joyful memory is immediately undercut by its loss. When Su-jin anxiously asks “Do you love me?”, Chul-soo’s silent tear in the next shot makes us feel that question with agonizing clarity. In one telling sequence (from a description of the film’s conclusion), Chul-soo reenacts their first meeting at a convenience store, even gathering Su-jin’s friends to watch. This isn’t just a narrative twist — it’s a cinematic jolt that reframes the ordinary. That first-meeting scene, normal and spontaneous in Act I, becomes a ritual in Act III, charged with uncanny weight. Through these reframings, the film makes us see everyday love through the alien lens of memory lost and regained.

Both films also play with time and fragmentation. In Saiyaara, the narrative starts as a band-origin story and shifts mid-film into a near-mystical search for lost love. Krish’s success with the song “Saiyaara” and his global fame seem secondary to the inner timeline of memory. The editing doesn’t run in real time; instead it sometimes jumps or skips ahead, mimicking Vaani’s fractured recall. After Vaani vanishes and reappears in an ashram with no memory of Krish, Saiyaara cuts between her present confusion and flashes of their past. Each cut is a defamiliarizing pulse – the viewer, like Vaani, can’t fully trust continuity. Similarly, A Moment to Remember intersperses present scenes in the institution with earlier happier times, sometimes overlapping dialogue and imagery so that what Su-jin is losing blurs with what we saw before. This deliberate narrative fragmentation is a hallmark of ostranenie: by preventing a seamless flow, the films force us to reassemble the story actively, staying present with every emotional beat.

In essence, Saiyaara and A Moment to Remember use every tool of cinema to “slow down perception.” The camera often holds on landscapes or cityscapes longer than we expect; an ordinary street corner, filmed from a distance, becomes lonely and strange once memory is absent. Suri and Lee let the music swell or drop into silence at unpredictable times, making quiet moments feel eerie rather than soothing. They vary pacing — one scene drips with tension in real time, the next leaps years forward. These choices prevent the audience from slipping into autopilot. Instead, we are made strange to the romance and to the world on screen. What could have been a conventional tearjerker instead has us re-observe small details: a crumbling wall, a creased photograph, the tremble in an actor’s eye.

Tools of Defamiliarization in These Films:

• Fragmented Narration: Both films break the timeline around the onset of illness. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are intercut in jarring ways, so memory itself becomes fragmented on screen. The story isn’t told in a neat chronology but in emotional vignettes, each cut reminding us how memory itself is discontinuous.
• Lingering Silences: Dialogues give way to silence at key moments. After Vaani calls Krish by someone else’s name or Su-jin realizes she forgot a life event, the scene pauses. The silence stretches uncomfortably — suddenly we notice the ambient noise of wind or street, as if the world itself has grown strange.
• Unhurried Pacing: Instead of crowd-pleasing urgency, the films savor slow tempo. Shots remain uncut, characters linger in thought. This stretching of time forces the viewer to dwell on small moments (“the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself”), mirroring how Alzheimer’s slows experience to a crawl.
• Poetic Imagery: The cinematography captures everyday spaces as uncanny. A wedding crowd seen through a rain-blurred window, or a roadside shrine glowing at dawn — each frame is composed to feel poetic rather than realistic. These images make familiar settings feel dreamlike and disquieting.
• Echoing Motifs: Both movies weave recurring visuals and sounds — an unplugged piano, a half-played song, a lock of hair — that reappear after memory lapses. These motifs act like jolts of estrangement: “look again, remember this,” they seem to say. The repetition is not comforting but jarring, reminding us that things we thought known might be unknown.

Each of these techniques is a form of Shklovsky’s “device” – a deliberate choice to deny the viewer passive consumption. By doing so, Saiyaara and A Moment to Remember renew our empathy. We don’t just watch the couple’s love; we feel alongside them what it is to forget a name, to confuse past and present, and to see the one you love turn into a stranger. In that trembling uncertainty the films create, love itself takes on an almost alien dimension. It’s no longer just a story we’ve heard before; it’s something we perceive anew through eyes widened by defamiliarization.

Ultimately, both films whisper that sometimes love is not a fairy tale to be narrated smoothly, but a star that wanders through dark skies. Saiyaara’s title, literally “wandering star,” and A Moment to Remember’s final scene of twilight revelation, underline this poetic vision. They challenge the cinematic convention of “happily ever after,” much as Shklovsky challenged art to challenge its audience. As one reviewer put it, Saiyaara ends with a sentiment: “Sometimes, love doesn’t end with a kiss. It ends with a song playing in an empty room... it hums soft and stubborn… like a feeling you almost forgot how to feel.” This isn’t melodrama — it’s the reshaped ordinary. Both films, through quiet courage and formal innovation, show us “a part of you that never moved on”, making the familiar ache of memory loss feel startlingly, heartbreakingly new.