Do Aur Do Pyaar: There are no villains in this gentle, thoughtful take on infidelity and love (Review 799)

Release date:	April 19, 2024
Director:	Shirsha Guha Thakurta
Cast:	Vidya Balan, Pratik Gandhi, Ileana D’Cruz, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Thalaivasal Vijay, Rekha Kudlig
Language:	Hindi-English with a bit of Tamil

 

“Who was at fault?” is usually the question asked when we hear stories of marital infidelity. While this black-and-white approach may work in cases where the power balance completely favours one partner, sometimes it makes more sense to ask: what went wrong? 

 

Debutant director Shirsha Guha Thakurta’s Do Aur Do Pyaar starring Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi is not in the business of finding villains. Instead it examines the circumstances that cause its protagonists to cheat on each other. 

 

Balan here plays Kavya Ganeshan, a Mumbai-based dentist whose husband Aniruddha Banerjee (Gandhi) runs his family enterprise. Kavya married Ani without the blessings of her conservative Tamilian parents. Over a decade later, her father (Thalaivasal Vijay) still disapproves of the man that the extended family continues to describe as his “Bengali son-in-law”. 

 

Unknown to Kavya’s folks in Ooty, the couple have drifted apart although they live in the same house. They have both been having long-term affairs with other people, except that the word “affair” sounds casual and sordid, whereas Kavya and Ani seem committed to their respective extra-marital partners: Vikram played by Sendhil Ramamurthy, who is a respected photographer, and Nora (Ileana D’Cruz), a talented artiste whose acting career is just taking off. 

 

A turn of events on a visit to Ooty takes the quartet in an unplanned direction. 

 

The Hindi film industry has so far favoured either maudlin hyperbole or ribald comedy while portraying unfaithful spouses. Comedy has been a route adopted for adulterous husbands (cases in point: No Entry, the Masti franchise) – adulterous wives, it seems, are serious business (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna). Do Aur Do Pyaar is neither trivial and sexist like the former bunch, nor weepie like the latter. It is a slice-of-life exploration of infidelity and love, that is never heavy-handed in its approach to these themes and in considerable stretches, is light-hearted, even funny. 

 

Do Aur Do Pyaar is a remake of the American film The Lovers, written and directed by Azazel Jacobs. I do not understand why Bollywood requires inspiration from abroad when every nook and cranny of this massive, complex country is teeming with original stories, but given that a decision was taken to remake this ordinary (albeit domestically acclaimed) American film, I am happy to report that Do Aur Do Pyaar is a vastly superior work. The Lovers provides just a skeletal premise that writers Suprotim Sengupta and Eisha Chopra have expanded into a substantial script featuring dialogues co-written with Amrita Bagchi. 

 

The Lovers was solely focused on the excitement that subterfuge brings to relationships. The leads were dull characters. Their feelings changed abruptly and inexplicably. Their partners were poorly developed, charmless creatures. The husband’s lover in particular was hysterical, possessive and unlikeable. In contrast, Do Aur Do Pyaar is a wistful and layered study of the human psyche. There is a plausible progression in Kavya and Ani’s feelings for each other and their lovers. In fact, if it weren’t for the prominent acknowledgement of the original in the opening credits, I doubt I would have noticed the sole similarity between the two storylines. 

 

One point that gives me pause is that the Indian film has lowered the ages of its protagonists by at least a generation. The Lovers is about an elderly couple with a college-going son, whereas Kavya and Ani are young. Whatever the excuse may be for the edit, it is a sad reminder that the Hindi industry is by and large disinterested in seniors as leads. 

 

Do Aur Do Pyaar is defined by its non-judgemental attitude towards its four main characters. Each is loveable in their own way. The prevalent social stereotype of the evil doosri aurat is discarded here in favour of compassion. I wish Nora had been given as much maturity and calm as Vikram, but at least she is never viewed with anything but empathy through Guha Thakurta’s lens.

 

Most conversations in Do Aur Do Pyaar sound natural, barring one crucial lengthy exchange between Kavya and her Dad in which he dispenses simplistic wisdom and she psycho-analyses her relationships in a vocabulary that borrows American cinema’s pop psychology clichés. That discussion disregards some of what went before and what follows. While I understand that the writers felt the need to resolve Kavya’s stormy ties with her father, it does not make logical sense that this feisty woman who had accused him of being cold and expressed the belief that her mother was scared of him, would in the climax turn to him for relationship advice. 

 

Kavya in that scene asks how he and her Mum have lasted so long. You just keep showing up every day, he replies glibly. Really? Did the frightened Mrs Ganeshan have a choice to not show up? Was she financially secure enough to leave him? If she had done so, would the family have supported her? The Kavya we have known until then would have challenged him on these points, would not have deemed the longevity of a joyless marriage an achievement, and is more likely to have asked Mom (Rekha Kudlig), “Why on earth did you not dump him?” – the response would, in all probability, have been far more illuminating. 

 

The scene as it stands feels like a cop-out, and a bid to reassure conservatives in the audience that although the hero and heroine strayed, the film itself favours socially prescribed territory. Do Aur Do Pyaar challenges traditionalism and many patriarchal norms until then and thereafter, but disappoints in this incongruous passage by batting for marriage over happiness. 

 

(No spoilers ahead, but some people may disagree) 

 

If this had been the finale, the film would have been ruined. Thankfully there is more to come. 

 

Romantic dramas across the world have stereotypical notions of “happily ever after”. Guha Thakurta and team skip that trap, leaving us with a rare – and rewarding – open-ended climax. 

 

A lot is said without being said in Do Aur Do Pyaar. Kavya’s adaptable food habits, for instance are as much an instrument of flirtation as a comment on the person she is below the feisty demeanour. Ani’s begun poshto is a metaphor both for affection and for the mundanity that replaces the early sparks in a romance. Beneath the quiet surface are roiling sentiments and resentments. And anything, yes everything, in Do Aur Do Pyaar can transform into fuel for a sense of humour when you least expect it. 

 

Guha Thakurta and her editor, Bardroy Barretto, keep the shifts in mood flowing smoothly. 

 

DoP Kartik Vijay’s pale palette lends a coldness to his frames irrespective of the habitat in which the couples wander. His camera miraculously manages to make grimy Mumbai come off as a sister locale of stunning Ooty, with both places reflecting the moods of their inhabitants as much as the beauty that nature has bestowed on at least one of them. 

 

Subhajit Mukherjee’s background score reminded me a teensy bit of Brokeback Mountain’s music – and I’m not complaining. I don’t see myself seeking out the soundtrack outside the four walls of this film, but within the span of the narrative they serve their purpose well. 

 

The Hindi industry is a long way away from acknowledging India’s language diversity in a script that truly reflects reality, but considering how insular Hindi filmmakers tend to be, Do Aur Do Pyaar is a baby step forward. The mere smattering of Tamil dialogues while the leads are in Ooty is not enough, but is still better than Hindi films set outside the Hindi belt that feature characters speaking in Hindi alone. For shining recent samples of the language authenticity found in scripts from the country’s other film industries, watch Thankam and Ariyippu.

 

Balan is delightful in Do Aur Do Pyaar, mutating from flirtatious to fiery to pained and conflicted in a matter of seconds. Her fluid expressions power the fluidity of the plot. 

 

Gandhi does hesitation and diffidence to perfection. He is so adorable that it’s easy to imagine why a distant wife may still reflexively reach out to fix the glasses sliding down Ani’s nose. 

 

D’Cruz and Ramamurthy never allow their gorgeousness to distract from Nora and Vikram’s vulnerability. When they hurt in Do Aur Do Pyaar, I did too. 

 

The title of this film translates to Two Plus Two Equals Love. Now don’t be a wet blanket and go looking for mathematical precision in that equation, because Do Aur Do Pyaar does add up. This is a consistently engaging, often amusing, always thoughtful, low-noise account of the ebbing tide in a waning marriage.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3   

 

Running time:

139 minutes

 

Visual courtesy: IMDB 

REVIEW 750: PAGALPANTI

Release date:	November 22, 2019
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast: Language:	Anil Kapoor, John Abraham, Ileana D’Cruz, Arshad Warsi, Pulkit Samrat, Kriti Kharbanda, Saurabh Shukla, Brijendra Kala, Urvashi Rautela, Inaamulhaq, Zakir Hussain Hindi

Pagalpanti (Madness) is what happens when Anees Bazmee gets a couple of good ideas in the middle of a creative drought, but does not quite know what to do with them. Bazmee is not someone who can be dismissed as a mindless, crude comic in the league of Sajid Khan. He is, after all, the director who served up Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar in top goofy form in Welcome (2007), and brought a degree of freshness to the stereotypical Bollywood representation of boisterous Punjabis in Singh Is Kinng (2008). Just two years back, he did a ripping job with the Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ileana D’Cruz starrer Mubarakan.

Pagalpanti is not Bazmee’s worst. Gosh no, that distinction goes to No Problem. But it is not a patch on his funnest works either.

Bazmee appears to have been struggling when he kicked off Pagalpanti. Nothing else can explain why he and his co-writers Rajiv Kaul and Praful Parekh chose to rehash for this film so many elements from successful Hindi slapstick comedies of the past decade. For a start, they picked a hero who is a ‘panauti’, just like Akshay Kumar’s character in the first Housefull. They added to that a mansion housing a beautiful female ghost, as in Great Grand Masti, going so far as to cast that film’s bhootni, Urvashi Rautela, in this one too. And if stampeding camels wreaked havoc in the climax of Welcome Back, here that job falls on the shoulders of a trio of lions.

The screenplay does nothing to any of these tropes to elevate them to the level of tributes. Even the twist in the bhootni’s tale does not serve that purpose. In between the writers do have a couple of good ideas, but those and the ensemble cast that includes some fine actors are all overshadowed by the overall lack of novelty in the story and treatment of Pagalpanti.

Raj Kishore (John Abraham), Junky (Arshad Warsi) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) are friends and failed business partners. Raj is supposed to be an unlucky guy who destroys the fortunes of all those around him too, but his buddies stay with him. When their paths cross with the Indian gangster brothers Raja Sahab (Saurabh Shukla) and Wi-Fi (Anil Kapoor) in London, these two dreaded men choose to hire them despite knowing that Raj Kishore’s mere presence can spell doom in their lives. No credible reason is offered for their decision.

What follows is a series of financial disasters, chases, exploding cars, the escalation of Raja and Wi-Fi’s long-running feud with fellow gangsters Tulli and Bulli, and a new-found enmity with a crook called Niraj Modi (you read the name right) who cheated Indian banks of thousands of crores before fleeing the country.

That last chap is played by Inaamulhaq, styled very precisely to look like the actual Nirav Modi. The obvious allusion to a high-profile real-life fugitive is interesting at first, until the scenario wears thin once it becomes clear that the writers do not know where to go with what started out as a clever move.

There is a point at which humour unexpectedly makes way for patriotic fervour, when Wi-Fi is given a passionate lecture about love for the country (meaning, India – of course – and not the United Kingdom which he has made his home). Just when it seems like Team Pagalpanti may be getting subversive and having a giggle at the expense of Bollywood’s hyper-nationalist brigade who have been churning out loud deshbhakti films in the past three years or so, they chicken out, and the scene ends tamely. This particular passage is unwittingly amusing in its effort not to appear too fixated on its desh prem, especially since it is clearly fixated on the same market as those aforementioned films.

It is always nice to watch Kapoor and Warsi letting their hair down, and they do manage to extract some laughs in Pagalpanti’s best moments. Years of facing the camera have given even Abraham a certain comfort with comedy that he did not initially have, and that too is nice to see. The younger members of the cast acquit themselves reasonably well, although they have not that much to do. Besides, there is only so much that actors can achieve in the face of lack of innovation.

The one effective aspect of Pagalpanti is that it continuously laughs at its genre. It does this primarily through the medium of Junky (Warsi) who rhymes words while he speaks and delivers lines rather than having normal conversations with people – each time he says something he is particularly impressed with, he expresses disbelief at his own smartness. Later, when Raj Kishore vomits out a monologue, he too responds to his own words in a similar fashion.

It is hard to be totally angry with a self-mocking film, especially considering that Bazmee manages to run through 165 minutes without a single wisecrack about rape, disability, farts and faeces, which have been favoured fodder in Hindi film comedies for some years now. But not being angry with a film, not disliking it is not the same as enjoying it. Pagalpanti is sporadically entertaining, but for the most part it feels stale and ordinary. Even the appearance of a Méhul Choksi lookalike in the end cannot lift the film out of its plainness. References to current events work if you have a take on them. Pagalpanti has none.

Rating (out of five stars): 1.5

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	152 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/pagalpanti-movie-review-john-abraham-co-goof-around-in-a-rehash-of-bollywood-comedy-cliches-7687401.html

Poster courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagalpanti_(2019_film)

REVIEW 579: RAID

Release date:	March 16, 2018
Director:	Raj Kumar Gupta
Cast: Language:	Ajay Devgn, Saurabh Shukla, Amit Sial, Ileana D’Cruz, Sheeba Chadha, Sulagna Panigrahi, Saanand Verma, Devas Dixit, Ravi Khanwilkar Hindi

An honest income-tax official conducts a carefully planned raid on one of the most powerful people in Uttar Pradesh. The lead star is Ajay Devgn. The director is the man who brought us Aamir and No One Killed Jessica. The year is 1981, back when sewing jewellery into mattresses and stashing cash under floor tiles was the order of the day among tax evaders.

Raj Kumar Gupta’s Raid works, for the most part, like a procedural drama. Devgn’s Amay Patnaik arrives at his new posting after being transferred from station to station as punishment for his integrity. Ritesh Shah’s writing largely mirrors this no-nonsense character, going about its business quietly and purposefully, and in the bargain throwing light on one of the least hailed of government departments.

Amay’s sincerity is established within minutes of his arrival on the scene. It is clear too right from the start that the enemy is not confined to the homes of wealthy families with unaccounted incomes. The enemy within is as lethal a combatant as any outside.

Apart from his associates, we also meet Amay’s wife Malini (Ileana D’Cruz) who unflinchingly supports him despite her exhaustion at the repeated packing and moving that have become constants in their life.

On the face of it, it could be said that Devgn has played precisely this part – a ramrod straight man within a broken system, doing his duty against all odds – a zillion times in his 27 year long career, yet there is a difference. In most of his previous such films, there was a superhero element to his role. In Singham, for instance, his Bajirao Singham virtually climbed pillars and walked on air to single-handedly bash up packs of goons. Here, in a production that strikes a far more realistic tone than the formulaic commercial Hindi cinema that dominates his filmography, Amay requires police protection to conduct his work freely, and is often afraid although he does not allow his fear to hamper his assignments.

Credible realism and Gupta’s unembellished directorial style are what make Raid such a gripping experience.

The film occasionally falters in this area – twice, to be precise, when the romantic songs Saanu Ek Pal and Nit Khair are needlessly jammed into the otherwise unrelentingly pacey proceedings. This trite device has been plucked out of the 1980s in which the tale is set, from the days when musical interludes were the primary means of portraying man-woman love in Bollywood and it was assumed that the audience wants such breaks within every powerful narrative. If anything, these numbers serve as irritating distractions in Raid, though thankfully they are brief enough to not be completely ruinous.

Once Amay’s team enters the house that is the fulcrum of the film’s action, Raid almost feels like a suspense thriller. Who is the informer who has given him such accurate information about a family with such clout? Will Amay manage to finish the task at hand or will he be disillusioned by how far the corrupt Tauji’s political allies will go to save him? And where on earth has Tauji hidden his ill-gotten riches?

As riveting as these questions is the realisation dawning on the viewer as the film rolls along, that income-tax officials operate in a very dangerous field. Potential transfers are nothing in comparison with the risk of actual physical harm that their targets could inflict upon them.

The manner in which Gupta leads up to this point is smooth and believable. It helps that he has picked a no-fuss cast who match his intent scene for scene, as does editor Bodhaditya Banerjee.

Devgn does brooding intensity better than most of his colleagues, and injects just the right amount of vulnerability into Amay to make him relatable. While some of the lines given to Amay (and wisely to Amay alone) hark back to the dialoguebaazi of an earlier era in Hindi cinema, the actor delivers them sans bombast to ensure that they are fun and do not sound dated.

Ileana as his wife gets limited screen time, but for what it is worth, she plays it well, achieving a nice note of indulgent bemusement in response to her husband’s often exasperating uprightness.

Saurabh Shukla as Tauji is the lynchpin of the striking supporting cast, with the screenplay giving him enough space to imbue the characterisation with interesting shades of gray. Sheeba Chadha as one of the bahus of his household and Amit Sial as Amay’s colleague are among the multiple satellite players who lend crucial detailing to their characters’ questionable morality.

Thankfully, none of the bad folk here are caricatures and one of the most enjoyable parts of Raid is Tauji’s relationship with his brusque, wizened old mother.

At 128 minutes and 3 seconds, Raid is just the right length for its pithy screenplay by Shah whose earlier credits include Citylights (2014) and Pink (2016). The opening text on screen informs us that it is “based on true stories”, and in the end we are told of the perils faced by income-tax officials in real life.

Media coverage and our own apathy have reduced these sarkari afsars to nothing but their nuisance value and the way they are misused by vengeful governments. Raid throws light on another crucial aspect of their story that we all ought to know, minus stereotypical Bollywood-style glorification of honest individuals. Barring those incongruous songs, the gendered language of the closing text on screen (which assumes that all income-tax officials are male, contrary to what we see even in Amay’s office) and a passing line about homosexuality that could perhaps have been better written, Raid is on point, insightful and engaging.

This is not the kind of fare you might expect to set your pulses racing, but that is precisely what it achieves in its closing scenes. Raid is not regular Bollywood. What it is though is thoroughly entertaining.

Rating (out of five stars): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	128 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/raid-movie-review-ajay-devgns-brooding-intensity-raj-kumar-guptas-gripping-direction-add-up-to-a-winner-4392773.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(2018_film)