If Do Aur Do Pyaar had been another Bollywood marriage narrative, it could have easily lost its course and become a complicated jumble, despite being a drama about two extramarital affairs that threaten to break a couple apart. It’s not.
When forbidden love starts to get out of control, chaos reigns. But it’s all limited to the circle that surrounds the four people—a woman, her husband, and each of their lovers—who are engaged in the two covert relationships. The movie isn’t a mess at all. Not at all. It follows an obvious, uncluttered route.
Do Aur Do Pyaar, directed by debutante Shirsha Guha Thakurta, is a delightfully lighthearted and admirably melancholic film that, in equal measure, captures the highs and lows of a covert romance and the battle to keep it that way.
The main attraction of the movie is Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi’s odd and incredibly successful performance as a married couple who have drifted apart after years of struggling through a stale relationship.
The two main actors give life to two genuine and sympathetic characters who are trapped in an unhappy marriage and are seeking—and discovering—excitement elsewhere. The writing’s calm, nonjudgmental tone helps them.
Written by Suprotim Sengupta, Eisha Chopra, and Amrita Bagchi. A decade and a half after the two college friends broke off all ties with Aniruddh Banerjee’s family and eloped from Ooty, Do Aur Do Pyaar takes viewers inside the Mumbai house of Kavya Ganeshan and Aniruddh Ganeshan.
Their relationship is effectively finished, twelve years after their wedding and fifteen years after they first met. Now that they are going through the motions, Kavya and Ani each have a lover to liven up their boring, routine lives. Ani is seriously involved with an aspiring actress, while Kavya is having a serious affair with a stunning hunk.
Vikram (Sendhil Ramamurthy, consistently in his element in his second Hindi film), the new man in Kavya’s life, is a globe-trotting photographer from New York. Ani’s affair with Nora (Ileana D’Cruz), a girl who is as impulsive as they come, has assumed serious proportions.
However, in Do Aur Do Pyaar, two and two do not equal four. Of course, the computations are off. Kavya and Ani exchange covert calls and messages while keeping their relationship a secret from one another. Although neither is aware of the other’s activities, they both understand that it is time to part ways.
The couple is forced to return to the hill village where their story all began due to a loss in the family. Songs from bygone eras come flooding back, long-dormant emotions are reawakened, memories are stirred, and a marriage on the verge of dissolution is given another chance.
Do Aur Do Pyaar, a remake of the 2017 Hollywood film The Lovers, does a fabulous job of adapting the original material to the requirements of a Bollywood drama about a marriage between a Tam Brahm woman and a Bengali man that when, things are on an even keel, thrives on their cultural and culinary differences.
The kitchen is where the two worlds meet most joyfully. As happier days are remembered, we see a confrontation between Ani’s beygun poshto—a recipe he learned from his grandmother—and Kavya’s Chicken65, which she recalls her husband was first served in a restaurant in Chennai. Although she has now become vegan, he has remained resolutely non-vegetarian.
Kavya and Ani’s love has lost the spark that first drew them together after years of being together. They no longer even converse or argue, let alone have had sex in years. A hush falls over the relationship. They live together in the same house, yet a vast river of apathy divides them. Their faces turned away from one another, they slept on the two sides of the bed.
Do Aur Do Pyaar gauges Kavya and Ani’s marital health by looking at how they sleep. They return to the restaurant/bar where Kavya proposed to Ani after a quick visit to her childhood home, where her mother (Rekha Kudligi) does her best to make her feel at home and her father (Thalaivasal Vijay) still harbours grudges against her. They wind up sharing a bed that is so little that they pass out in each other’s arms. Will the pair be able to rekindle the romance that their marriage has lost, though?
Their occupations also help to define them. Ani inherited his father’s failing cork factory, which is now his property. Kavya practices dentistry. Neither of the two attractive individuals who upend their lives and drive their marriage to its limits is stuck in the kind of dull routine to which Kavya and Ani have grown used.
When we first encounter actress Nora, she is getting ready for an audition that could be her ticket to stardom. Photographer Vik has seen the globe and believes that Kavya holds the key to a secure future.
Vik tells Kavya at one point that he has visited every city on earth, but no location has ever felt like home. He says, “I’m done running, chasing, and wandering.” His nomadic lifestyle stands in stark contrast to Kavya’s monotonous existence.
The clinic and office are the centre of Kavya and Ani’s lives. They don’t speak to each other at home. As they go about their daily business, they fret about the size of the garbage bags, adjust the air conditioner’s temperature, and monitor the anti-allergy medications that have become a daily requirement.
Do Aur Do Aur Pyaar explores the collision between the liberating allure of dalliance and the dreariness of domesticity, without ever taking a moralistic stand on a married couple who is cheating on one another.
Do Aur Do Pyaar is a modest and refined little gem that is as remarkably at ease in its own skin as the four characters that centre it. It is refreshingly dispassionate about matters of the heart but consistently engaging in the way it treats human equations both inside and outside the institution of marriage.
