Do Aur Do Pyaar review: An unpretentious little gem that is remarkably comfortable

Do Aur Do Pyaar Review: The film’s main strength is the unexpected, astonishingly felicitous coupling of Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi as a married couple who have drifted apart after years of struggling through a stagnant relationship

A drama involving extramarital relationships – yes, two – that threaten to pull a couple apart could easily have gotten off track and turned into a jumbled mess if Do Aur Do Pyaar had just been another Bollywood marriage story. It isn’t.
When forbidden love spirals out of control, there is widespread uncertainty. All of this, however, is limited to the orbit of the four people participating in the two secret liaisons: a woman and her husband, as well as their respective partners. The film itself is straightforward. Far from it. It follows a clear, uncluttered course.

Do Aur Do Pyaar, directed by first-timer Shirsha Guha Thakurta, strikes an even balance between the highs of illicit romance and the lows that come with the battle to keep it hidden.

The film’s main strength is the unexpected, astonishingly felicitous coupling of Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi as a married couple who have drifted apart after years of struggling through a stagnant relationship.

The two lead performers flesh out a couple of real and realistic individuals trapped in a failed marriage who seek – and find – stimulation elsewhere. They benefit from the writing’s calm, nonjudgmental tone.

The film’s main strength is the unexpected, astonishingly felicitous coupling of Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi as a married couple who have drifted apart after years of struggling through a stagnant relationship.

The two lead performers flesh out a couple of real and realistic individuals trapped in a failed marriage who seek – and find – stimulation elsewhere. They benefit from the writing’s calm, nonjudgmental tone.

The script was written by Amrita Bagchi, Eisha Chopra, and Suprotim Sengupta. Do Aur Do Pyaar transports the spectator inside the Mumbai home of Kavya Ganeshan and Aniruddh Banerjee, a decade and a half after the two college friends eloped from Ooty and severed all links with the former’s family.

Their relationship is all but finished, 15 years after they first met and 12 years after they married. As they go through the motions, Kavya and Ani now have a boyfriend each to liven up their dreary, monotonous existence. Kavya has a serious affair with a handsome hunk, but Ani is seriously attached with an aspiring actress.

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Vikram (Sendhil Ramamurthy, who is in his element in his second Hindi film), the new man in Kavya’s life, is a globetrotting photojournalist from New York. Ani’s affair with Nora (Ileana D’Cruz), a girl as impetuous as they come, has taken serious turn.

However, two and two do not equal four in Do Aur Do Pyaar. The calculations always go wrong. Kavya and Ani exchange secret texts and phone calls while they keep their affairs hidden from each other. Neither knows what the other is up to, but both are well aware that it is time to go their separate ways.

A death in the family leads the pair to return to the hill village where everything began for them. Long-dormant feelings are reignited, memories are recalled, music from happier times flood back, and a marriage on the verge of dissolution is given a second opportunity.

Do Aur Do Pyaar, a remake of the 2017 Hollywood film The Lovers, does an excellent job of adapting the original material to the needs of a Bollywood drama about a marriage between a Tam Brahm woman and a Bengali man that, when things are going well, thrives on their cultural and culinary differences.

The kitchen is where the two worlds meet most joyfully. When happier days are remembered, we see a battle between Ani’s beygun poshto, a dish passed down from his thakuma (grandmother), and Kavya’s Chicken 65, which, as she tells her husband, originated in a Chennai restaurant. She has since become vegan, while he remains adamantly opposed to vegetarianism.

Years of being together have drained Kavya and Ani’s relationship of the spark that drew them together. They no longer chat or argue, even though they haven’t had sex in years. Silence envelopes the relationship. They share a home, but a vast river of apathy separates them. They sleep on the two edges of the bed, their faces turned away each other.

Do Aur Do Pyaar examines their sleeping postures to assess the health of Kavya and Ani’s marriage. Her brief return to her childhood home, where her father (Thalaivasal Vijay) still carries a grudge against her and her mother (Rekha Kudligi) does her hardest to make her feel welcome, leads them back to the restaurant-cum-bar where Kavya proposed to Ani. They end up sleeping in each other’s arms since their bed is too small. Will the couple be able to revive the romance that has been absent from their marriage?

Their jobs also define them. Ani inherited his father’s struggling cork factory Kavya is a dentist. Neither of the two desirable persons who upend their life and threaten their marriage is stuck in the same dreary routine that Kavya and Ani have become accustomed to.

Nora is an actress who, when we first encounter her, is preparing for an audition that will be her ticket to the big time. Vik is a photographer who has seen the entire world and sees in Kavya the possibility of a solid home.

At one point, Vik tells Kavya that he has visited every city in the world, but no location has ever felt like home. I’m done wandering, chasing, and running, he says. His peripatetic existence contrasts sharply with Kavya’s stability.

Kavya and Ani’s lives revolve around the office and clinic. They don’t speak at home. They go about their activities, managing the temperature of the air conditioner, fretting about the size of the rubbish bags, and keeping track of the anti-allergy medicines that are now a daily requirement.

Do Aur Do Aur Pyaar juxtaposes the monotony of domesticity with the allure of liberated dalliance, although the film never takes a moralistic stance on the married couple cheating on one other.

Do Aur Do Pyaar is an unpretentious and genteel little gem that is as remarkably comfortable in its skin as the four characters it revolves around. It is refreshingly dispassionate about matters of the heart while unfailingly engaging in the way it treats human equations within and outside the institution of marriage.

Cast:

Vidya Balan, Pratik Gandhi, Ileana D’Cruz, and Sendhil Ramamurthy

Director:

Shirsha Guha Thakurta