Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat Is  Anurag Kashyap’s  Mellowest Most Meditative Movie In  Many Years

Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat

Written & Directed  by Anurag Kashyap

Rating: *** ½

That annoying cackle! In one of the two  love stories that are fused together  in Anurag Kashyap’s fascinating new work of  heart, Yakub, the  intellectually  dim  loverboy has  a laugh like  a hyena on heat which is hard to beat  and anything but a treat.

Silly impetuous Yaqub(Karan Mehta) stalks silly adventurous underage Amrita(Alaya F).  Somewhere  in London another a struggling musician Hameet(Karan Mehta, again)  is stalked by Ayesha(Alaya F), again underage  , the rich  spoilt pampered  lonely daughter of a Pakistani millionaire  who, according to Ayesha, bangs  everything that moves.

In one of the film’s most beautifully conceived  sequences  Ayesha tells the  introverted Harmeet why she cannot help being his  little lamb, why she goes all mushy when she looks at him.

It’s  a memorable monologue  brilliantly performed by Alaya . She is most certainly a  better actor than her grandfather Kabir Bedi  and her mother Pooja Bedi.Karan Mehta is a notable find.He will find his way eventually.

The  narrative scampers  from Dalhousie to  London and back again without skipping a beat.  There is  a virile fluency about the narrative quite difficult to pinpoint and define. But it’s there underlining  almost every  scene.

What doesn’t work at all is  Vicky Kaushal’s  DJ act. Mouthing gyan and Gulzar  as  if he owns them, Kaushal is  as annoying as  Yaqub’s laughter. The  film needed  a far more sturdy and centralized  narrator. Not this  idiot in a  headband trying to  be cool but  remaining just a fool who has probably never been to school.

That  apart, Kashyap packs in quite  a punch  in both the love stories. He lets the  couple make massive blunders in their relationships and  doesn’t judge them. The mistakes  in fact  add a luster of  unvarnished  credibility to the going-on. Oftentimes, especially in the  Indian segment,  the lovers are shown to be muddled headed and  reckless. But that, says Kashyap, is  what makes them  so  much in  love.

Almost Pyaar With  DJ Mohabbat is  a charming mix of fluid fantasy and  raw realism.Sometimes  it is  hard  to tell the  fantasy  from the  reality. The coincidences especially the one that ties the  two couples, are  a bit too much Gulshan Nanda in Shakespeare. But that’s what  makes  love what it is. A puzzle which only Gulzar’s lines can define: Sirf  ehsaas hai yeh  rooh se mehsoos karo pyar ko pyar hi rehne do koi naam na  do. Touche.