Love is love: At long last, a true romance

Don’t act too smart with me,” warns the girl, staring down the boy stalking her around the streets of Srinagar. He has a peculiar objection: “But I have to work hard at being smart. Shakal achchi nahin hai na.” He rattles off his smartness regimen, from dressing sharply to “maintaining a stubble,” but already both girl and audience have been caught off guard, because the boy is not the most conventionally dashing leading man — and has the elegance to point it out before we can. Talk about disarming charm.

Directed by Sajid Ali and written by his illustrious brother Imtiaz Ali, Laila Majnu has the ability to surprise us, despite how well we know the age-old Persian legend: Young lovers are torn apart by their families till they lose their minds and their lives.

This Laila knows when boys are looking at her. Similar to the boy’s studied smartness, this is more because of her coquettishness than any unreal beauty.

The daughter of a Kashmiri politician, she’s pampered and invincible till, one fateful night, she locks eyes with him. He is the enemy. Or at least, the son of her father’s enemy, which damns their affair. They giddily spend all day talking on the phone, or mooning around the same Srinagar cafe as if there is only one decent cafe in Srinagar.

“Let’s make the best of the situation before I finally go insane,” Eric Clapton sings in his ‘Layla’, and the brothers Ali make the best of this myth by keeping it modest. The production feels raw and there is a straightforward authenticity to the writing and acting, without needless comic relief. The makers give this tragedy the respect it deserves.

The winsome Tripti Dimri plays Laila without overwrought histrionics. Avinash Tiwari is excellent as her lover Qais, especially as the film gets intense.

The crazed lover is one of Imtiaz Ali’s recurring themes — he even told the Laila-Majnu story within a sequence of Tamasha — but here, writing a direct adaptation, freed of the need to rationalise the romance, it works better.

Laila Majnu is a film about the beholders. About how some are more blessed than others. Here are highly flawed, doomed characters, yet they find something special, enviable and real. Who among us dares judge a true romantic? Love is love.