Love Games

Dil Kabaddi deals with sex, the way Bollywood has dealt with sobs all this while. It invades the bedrooms of couples, and then takes over their colourful imagination that all the while lurks behind their ordinary, pristine faces. It also turns the rulebook of priorities, when it comes to marriages, on its head with a sleek, almost sly humour.

Mita Soha Ali Khan and Samit Irrfan Khan are fighting a rocky marriage where the latter8217;s colourful instincts hit a blind lane with the 8216;cold8217; prissy wife. They fight at dinners, yell at each other, finally resulting in Samit leaving Mita for a saucy, silly, sexed-up gym instructor Kaya Payal Rohatgi. Simi Konkona Sen Sharma and Rishi Rahul Bose are the 8216;sensible8217; pair, who talk in rhetoric, don8217;t indulge in verbal violence even in their bedrooms. The story is basically about them as they bump into people, and of course, temptation.

However, Dil Kabaddi is more like a delightful scrapbook with no particular direction to the narrative. It loosely puts together snatches of people8217;s lives more like a college farewell video, with monologues, incidents, flashbacks and an omniscient narrator. If the film is at all held together in course of its two-hour duration, it8217;s thanks to the actors. And the little vignettes of human character that we run into every now and then, but have usually dismissed.

Irrfan Khan and Rahul Bose leave you in splits. Dil Kabaddi and its brand of comedy is exactly their forte and they leave to stone unturned as bumbling, constipated men. Soha Ali Khan and her delicate, classic physicality completely complements her charcter in the film as does her histrionics. Konkona Sen Sharma as the flawed, complaining, matronly woman bored with her marriage is top notch. Rahul Khanna too is in his elements.

Dil Kabaddi comes to an end even before you realize that there8217;s little in the way of a story, but as long as there8217;s Irrfan Khan prancing around in a baby pink Christmas cap, you wouldn8217;t be bothered.