The Seductive charm that worked for Do aur Do Pyaar.
Yesterday evening, I skipped my gym session to watch this movie called “Do aur Do Pyaar” (Two plus two equals love). It is a slightly multilingual, predominantly Hindi movie, that touches upon the modern nuances of being in love, and most importantly being together in love.
As usual, this piece evolves a detailed, intimate treatment of the movie because this happens only once in a while - we have a movie that I actually liked. So I would be slightly verbose about why so, and why you should watch the movie. It is a slick take on modern relationships. It is very well written and gives us a glimpse to the larger lives of the characters off the scenes we witness. So if you haven’t watched the movie, there ought to be spoilers. Better watch it, and then come back here to read why it worked (or to argue with me why it didn’t).
The movie tracks the lives of two lovers who were once so into each other. But as it happens so often, life happened and they settled into a life where they shared everything except love. The mundanity, tedium and pointlessness of the time spent together, makes them fall in love again. But with different people. The movie gives us no reasons as to why they shouldn’t choose love. Even their affairs aren’t as bad. Clearly, the people involved with them have their own set of flaws. But so do our protagonists. It is a bunch of flawed people, hopelessly searching for love.
But then, the movie throws in a pleasant surprise.
Their affairs fail to wreck their marriage. Or worse, their affairs fail to make a dent on how they feel about each other. Even after having long (two years to be precise) dalliances with seemingly interesting people, they could still be into each other. After five years of being “trapped” in the city in the cages of lives that chose them, a mere escapade in the form of an unexpected funeral is enough to rekindle their romance.
Why so?
It is this investigation that leads us to realising why the thread of this movie is so seductive. Their “rekindling” of romance is not a superficial excuse to stray back into the moribund life that they share. It feels afresh, almost as if they are discovering each other for the first time. The freshness of their affair comes from the deep bond of friendship that they share. With a deft sleight of hand, the writer has baked in the allurement of a soulful friendship into this love story. And it is the magic sauce that makes the movie click.
If you look at the way they see each other, there is no magic left in their relationship. They have very few reasons to keep admiring each other, till they reach a point where a self assurance is due, or the other will crumble. But then, their past has given them conditions to immerse themselves in each other. The invisible thread that binds them together is also the promise of humour, which few of us are fortunate to receive, but is the necessary ingredient of any successful human relationship.
The movie is impressively funny at many instances. But this humour is not crafted into the narrative to make us laugh. That is very evident, because laughing amidst such a poignant tale almost fills us with regret. As their apparently tragic lives unfold in front of us, how can we even laugh at the trite, but thoughtful scenes that extract more than a chuckle from us? These could extend to anything from raunchy to awkward moments, but they sure make us laugh. But their prime purpose is not that. When we see on screen how the protagonists enjoy each other, humour transcends into something that concretises the very idea of a love that can make us laugh through every crisis of life - and love.
It is this promise of a deep, soulful friendship inside love that makes the movie work. Even when our protagonists lie, cheat and make excuses to make sense of their wretched double lives, we are still drawn to them. It comes from the jealousy that envelopes us the moment we realise the special gift of love that they have. Their love works because it is their friendship that brought them together. When asked how they fell in love, they couldn’t answer. The commercial movies hardly show us the organic abundance of forgetfulness in our love lives.
We keep forgetting. And that is not a bad thing.
Nothing fresh can grow out of a mind that is crippled by the perceived permanency of memories. It is the erasures that pave way for new brooks of promise to flow in and touch our deepest depths. When we fail to let go of things that shouldn’t matter anymore, the prime colours of our minds descend into arrested putrescence. It is a futile exercise like trying to beat death. Your mind metamorphoses into an olid graveyard with unburnt corpses of nettling memories. Ironically, it is this act of forgetting that enables them to fall in love with each other.
What if they are still nursing the grudges that a 12 year old marriage gave to them? They have had ample of reasons to fight and stay mad at each other. But time taken away from each other, even when they are physically close, leads to their minds moving around the problems, and reasons to hate on. But what remains between them is the stump of an old love that was firmly held because of the deep bond of friendship that they shared. A friendship that doesn’t necessarily grow out of need, but out of a curiosity about the other that grew out of the search for complementarity in their lives.
Truly, in the best of love affairs, we forget why we fell in love. Not that we didn’t have reasons to fall in love in the first place, but the mind learns to forget the reasons deliberately. It is this mystique, and the charm of trusting the guts (however dangerous that be), which work for long marriages that survive the vagaries of time and the incongruences of the trainwreck that is modern life.
What I am trying to argue here is that it is the imperfections that we hold, which gives us the best of relationships. But it is not that the imperfections can work alone. They are rather absorbed by the affectionate camaraderie that we share with our partner. We cannot rekindle a sexual flame that has been exhausted from the want of excitement in life. But, if the relationship was the one that nudged our inner jokers out, and would give us reasons to squeeze humour out of the mundane, we have hit the jackpot.
The movie opens with the simile of a toothpaste, being a proxy for love. Kavya and Vikram, in the opening sequence, related the lifecycle of a toothpaste tube with that of how relationships rise and wane. They could imagine the sexiness of a couple brushing together. They could rightly see how the material aspect of love - that is how we treat our significant other - changes over time. They are very much in love, and are seduced by the promise of a future together. Like all forlorn lovers, they speculate that their love will be different - theirs would be a toothpaste tube which will not be mishandled at a later stage. Yet they fail. In the end, they treat each other like an abused toothpaste tube. As they suggest in the beginning, one could very well just throw away the tube and get a new one, but we don’t. That is the sticky nature of love that has left thorns in all our pity hearts.
The highlight here is the promise of a sexy romance that brings their orbits closer to each other.
Ani and Nora, on the other hand, share a symbiotic relationship, where they give a shoulder to each other. Nora betrays streaks of immaturity, but that is not her. She tries hard to be reasonable, despite the romantic in her yearning for a gooey, fairytale romance. But she has settled for Ani, because he is there for her. Ani had to work in the cork factory overtime and that took him away from Kavya. But it also brings him closer to Nora. Like a lichen that makes its way to life over the most unlikeliest terrains, Nora and Ani find love. But there too, the motivations seem to slightly diverge.
Ani might be seeing his long lost dreams of music and passion in Nora’s aspirations to be an actress. Nora is drawn to him by his ability to provide care - a finite resource which is made available to her only because Ani was away from Kavya.
Here, both affairs are different - as different as the circumstances and the characters that Vikram and Nora are. But interestingly, there is one thing in common. They both lack the ability to extract humour out of the mundane. Never, Vikram or Kavya could extract laughter out of a situation when an old hog finally croaks. Nora and Ani could never be comfortable with each other’s clumsiness, the way Kavya and Ani are at the Elephanta Bar. There is definite romance and love between Vikram and Kavya, and as much in Ani and Nora. And it is a good thing that the writers never denigrate their relationships.
Yet, the writers have attempted to study why certain relationships work - and why others don’t. Their thesis seems to highlight the need for humour and connections that come from going deeper into the naughty, hasslefree selves that flies over the finicky “requirements” of serious romance. More often, success comes from the ability to laugh at ourselves and not taking ourselves too seriously. The rarefied air of expectations given up - it is this queer condition that brings Kavya and Ani together again.
It is this promise that keeps us all hooked to the screen till the end. It is a movie directed by a woman, and two of the three writers are women. It is impossible to discount how this diversity could have breathed a fresh air into an otherwise boring, moralist landscape of Indian romance on-screen.
My study was more about how this movie worked. It made me think about how enduring romance will not emerge between people who cannot conjure up laughter in the face of boredom. Currency of romance is in self depreciation, and the ability to fight without scorn. Admiration is born out of the ability to beat hard, and simultaneously kiss harder sensually.
That may very well be the secret of romance, or at least how romance could be distilled and sanitised for books, movies and whatnot. Truly, it is not romance that makes our lives brighter. It is the clear eyed, shameless exploration of vulnerabilities, quirks and quotidian agonies that take us to the courtyards of our souls where we find a boring love that lasts.
Do aur Do Pyaar is a highly recommended movie for all. Do watch the movie and email me your comments.
With Love,
Comments can be mailed to mail@hashin.me