By Subhash K. Jha
Mumbai, Jan 17 (IANS): Film: "Karle Pyaar Karle"; Cast: Shiv Darshan, Hasleen Kaur; Director: Rajesh Pandey; Rating: ***
Though there are five-six villains in various get-ups appointed to create mayhem in the romance, the biggest enemy that the film's dare-to-stare couple faces is the couple themselves!
Yup, Kabir and Preet, played by debutants Shiv Darshan and Hasleen Kaur, are wedded to recklessness. They laugh in the face of life and death. They sing when they should be running for their lives. This could have something to do with the fact that our Heer-Ranjha inspired Bollywood romances need to take a song break even when apocalypse is around the corner. Sing is unanimously king.
I liked the way the couple makes troubles disappear by simply indulging in tit-for-tat verbal spats. And to their credit, the couple gets crisply written and sharply-sarcastic lines written by three youngsters - Rakesh Pandey, Reshu Nath and Rahul Patel.
The bantering lines are elivered with the sharpness of shallow people trying to out-smart life by pretending to have cracked the formula of easy-living.
There are sharp edges to the couple's blow-hot-blow-cold relationship.
Shiv and Harleen negotiate their character's excess quota of audaciousness with a fair degree of ease. Though Shiv needs to work on his dialogue-delivery, he is his own man-child, creating in Kabir the kind of annoying know-all been-there-done-it-all hero that can only get itself into trouble in the last reel. Or for that matter, any reel.
Being a home-production, Shiv gets to be that wide-eyed boy in a toy store, who can buy everything including the sales girls.
Shiv dances, fights, races on fast cars and faster mo'bikes, indulges in comedy and has the liberty to punctuate a purportedly dramatic scene with a dollop of chuckles. It's a tough way to start an acting career. But then who said kids from within the film industry had it easy?
Hasleen is easy on the eyes. She bears more than a passing resemblance to Shradha Kapoor. For a first film, she sure knows how to make the right camera moves.
The rest of the cast is pretty much a blur of back-end distractions.
An Alzheimer's stricken grandmother, who thinks Dilip Kumar is still the reigning matinee idol; an abused mother who lets her lover's belt do the talking on the house; and a sadistic villain who likes to saw off his enemy's limbs and then tells his wife on the phone to make aloo parathas for dinner - all these oddballs are added on to a picnicky concoction about truly star-crossed lovers who seem to spell trouble for each other every time they meet, but cannot seem to stay away from each other.
Interestingly, written and directed with confidence (sometimes misplaced) by debutant director Rajesh Pandey, "Karle Pyaar Karle" is Nasir Hussain on steroids.
It's a colourful, breezy, effervescent rumbustious ode to the spirit of being young.
Fun in a feisty fashion, "Karle Pyaar Karle" deviates from the boy-meets-girl formula with a breezy, pacy, easy-going casual kind of narration that tells you not to get serious about the goings-on.
Though the plot frequently resort to hurling mo'bike races for the kids, the narration is never on the skids.