Tanuj Virwani takes a drag off a cigarette that looks entirely too expensive for a small-town college student, and right there, about twelve minutes into the runtime, you realize nobody involved in the production of Purani Jeans has ever spent an afternoon hanging around a dusty Kasauli hostel without an air conditioner humming in the background. If I'm honest, that kind of lazy texture error defines the whole enterprise, leaking out from the margins until even the supposed emotional peaks feel like they were shot on a soundstage in suburban Mumbai with some artificial pine boughs stuck to a wooden flat. Director Tanushri Chhattu treats memory as something you can just slap a heavy sepia filter over and call it a day, never once trusting the audience to recognize the ache of youth unless the background score swells up to three times its normal volume to tell you that someone is currently feeling nostalgic about high school.

The screenplay keeps recycling the exact same beats of misunderstanding and unspoken longing that Farhan Akhtar handled with actual grace and rhythm in Dil Chahta Hai, but without any of the messy specifics that make those male friendships feel lived-in and abrasive. Instead, we get a bunch of pretty faces standing on scenic overlooks talking in unnatural paragraphs about loyalty and growing up, as if lines like that were written by someone who only learned about human interaction through old greeting cards. Aditya Seal tries his best to inject some genuine desperation into his scenes, pacing around rooms and barking his dialogue with a rough-edged intensity that often exposes how hollow the surrounding script actually is. Then there is Sarika, who plays the mother figure with a weary sort of patience that suggests she read her scenes on the way to the makeup trailer and decided to just play the icon of unconditional love because the director couldn't offer her anything more complicated to dig into.

Izabelle Leite floats through the frames with an ethereal calm that occasionally works against the supposed dramatic friction of the love triangle at the center of the plot, looking every bit the pristine model she was cast as rather than a messy teenager wrestling with real choices. Rajit Kapoor pops up as the elder statesman of the cast, delivering his lines with that precise theatrical cadence that feels completely detached from the younger actors he is supposed to be sharing a history with. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the wardrobe department clearly ironed every single flannel shirt these guys wore before every single flashback, destroying any illusion that these characters were roughing it out in hostels or bumming around railway stations.

Ram Sampath’s soundtrack does heavy lifting, perhaps too much of it, trying to paper over the narrative gaps with acoustic guitar strums that repeat themselves so often you start guessing the exact second the snare drum will kick in. Cinematographer Amalendu Chaudhary points his camera at the mountains with a functional competence, but there is no dirt under the fingernails of these images, no grit in the wind, just postcard aesthetics that keep Hindi movies trapped in this weirdly sanitized fantasy version of small-town northern India. When the narrative jumps back and forth between the present-day corporate grind and the golden-hued days of youth, the transitions are handled with dissolves so cliché you can practically hear the editing suite software groaning under the weight of the convention.

There is a specific kind of emptiness that settles in when a film about the unbreakable bonds of boyhood decides to rely entirely on slow-motion shots of people running toward each other in a misty meadow instead of building any actual chemistry between the actors playing those boys. You watch these characters bicker over trivialities and supposedly deep secrets, and you realize the filmmakers have mistaken the mere act of reminiscing for actual character development, assuming that if you mention old mixtapes and shared cigarettes enough times, the audience will just supply their own emotional investment. Bollywood movies have always had a weakness for this brand of glossy nostalgia, trading genuine human mess for picturesque heartache, yet few recent entries feel quite this determined to ignore the rough edges of growing up just to keep the frame looking like an advertisement for a premium clothing brand. By the time the central conflict about a misunderstood betrayal finally resolves itself in a crowded airport lounge, the stakes feel microscopic, leaving you wondering why anyone involved thought this particular faded pair of trousers was worth pulling out of the closet one more time.