Do Aur Do Pyaar review: A relatable modern day tale of romance!

Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi’s film is a slice-of-life love story about chaotic, complicated relationships where you find yourself while finding each other again. 

Modern-day relationships have become more complex than before even though new terms like situationships are invented daily to make them more understandable and easier. Do Aur Do Pyaar is a testament to this haywire modern-day romance, with urban gaze and cultural resonance where people still believe that marriage is a wonderful institution, but not everyone wants to sign up for it.

Based on the English film The Lovers, this film is a one-line concept. A married couple, bored out of living in their eat-sleep-repeat life, ends up cheating on each other without the other person knowing. As basic and judgmental as this sounds, the film understands how heavy-handed the subject is and explores this intricately and beautifully in a light-hearted manner. It doesn't turn too dark but does have some serious moments of revelation. The story unfolds as a lived-in reality of Kavya (Vidya Balan) and Aniruddh (Pratik Gandhi), where we see them in separate happy relationships while staying together in the rut of their marriage. Kavya spends time with a vagabond photographer, Vikram (Sendil Ramamurthy), and Aniruddh is busy with a theatre artist, Nora (Ileana D' Cruz). 

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This film is sot of a reverse rom-com where a well-established couple lives through the beats of falling in love as they go from being strangers in marriage to lovers once again. But to call this film just a feel-good story would be a disservice to its depth! Because we not just watch but experience this phase of their married life where monogamous and monotonous marriage reigns apathy and resentment which results in extra-marital affairs as their distance creates an ache to find in some other person what they are missing in each other. With Vikram, Kavya is trying to fulfill that artistic side she misses in Ani, while with Nora, Ani is trying to satisfy this desire to be needed by someone. The beauty lies in how this film isn't judgemental of its characters or their decisions. Despite Virkram and Nora's lives being shown as an extended attachment to Kavya and Ani, both of them aren't reduced to one-liner stereotypes and have enough space to form their own personalities. Even real spaces become characters like Mumbai is a reality check while Ooty is a nostalgic ride! 

Even the film's protagonists aren't judged for cheating. Instead it keeps its focus on cheating as a concept where it becomes the source of starting a journey to find oneself while being with someone new. And this read-in between the lines becomes the language of the film, which is riddled with subtexts. A toothpaste being used to its end forms a metaphor for a relationship, while the activity of brushing your teeth in front of your partner becomes a metaphor for vulnerability in a relationship. Even its humor is derived from double entendres, pun-intended dialogues, and tragic situation turned into comedy. Chicken 65 or cooking posto together becomes about turning each other on. And a funeral and trip back home reignites the lost spark between the couple. Maybe it's inevitable for couples, who are too comfortable in the relationship, to feel some sort of lack in their lives as if something has died between them. Hence going back to the known can bring back feelings, especially when you live together for so long that you become roommates who hardly notice each other.

A refreshing new jodi of formidable actors, Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi, have the kind of chemistry that hits the right notes as they feel like a couple who found love in friendship! It's almost ironic that a rebellious couple that fought the world and eloped together stops fighting for each other. This is where the debut director Shirsha Guha Thakurta work is innovative and brave in Do Aur Do Pyaar. As the film becomes an attempt at understanding how sometimes a couple grows apart, from being soulmates to hanging by a thread while walking the parallel lines. And in the wake of it they might choose to seek from outside what they are missing within but nowhere this is posed as a necessity. It's like the film is saying that humans are a complex breed of species built from their own traumas, and even if they can't understand each other all the time, they can at least try to.

Do Aur Do Pyaar is currently in theatres near you! 

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