In the nostalgically plush Do Deewane Seher Mein (for those who came in late, the title comes from a lovely Runa Laila-Bhupinder duet from 1977’s Gharaonda) those halcyon aimless romantic drifts from Basu Chatterjee’s rom-coms in the 1970s, are brought back with love and grace.
Ravi Udyawar directs this delicate, tender, slender story with cuddlesome affection. There is room here for online poetry and homespun silliness. The protagonists, Roshni and Shashank, are two self-appointed misfits who realize in no time at all (the film is just over two hours long) what their problem is: that there is no problem.
These are two sweet kids, one sweet and adoring, the other with a little bit of attitude, who suffer from anxieties, one about her looks, the other about his lisp. As they grow fond of one another, the walls against self-acceptance that they have built around themselves, dissolve.
This is one of those rare rom-coms where nothing terrible happens to anybody. There is no villain except Shashank’s lips which at the end turns out to be no villain at all. Nobody dies. In fact, there is a rather lame joke about death where Roshni’s father (the talented Joy Sengupta, he deserves more) teases his daughter about her mother (Ayesha Raza)’s longevity.
The supporting characters get just about minimal space to do what they have to. I, for one, want to know more about the supportive, empathetic waiter Dheeraj (Mark Parakh) in the café that Shashank frequents. What makes Dheeraj so compassionate?
And what about Shashank’s troubled relationship with his father? And Roshni’s sibling rivalry with Naina (Sandeepa Dhar)? Writer Abhiruchi Chand keeps it clean and unmessy.
The marrow of the matter is the hesitant relationship which Rosni and Sasank sare, sorry, ….Roshni and Shashank share. When they begin to care for one another, the narrative leans back and watches them grow as a couple.
Do Deewane Seher Mein is a quiet, gentle, unhurried stroll down a romantic lane with two likeable people who are not quite made for each other. But as someone in a stormy relationship in another film said recently, “I am unhappy. But I am not unhappy because of you. I would rather be unhappy with you than alone.”
Wis(h)ing Ros(h)ni and S(h)as(h)ank an unhappy life together.
