Review: 10 ml Love is silly but sweet

Raja Sen feels 10 Ml Love has enough to offer for a good time.

Things only start warming up with the cuckold.

10 Ml Love, a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream set around the events of a Mumbai wedding, starts off both pleasantly enough but feels mildly exasperating, as performers struggle with dialogues conceived in English that haven't quite lasted the jump to Hindi.

It all feels like watching a sub-par theatre company going through ambitious, if ill-conceived, motions.

And then pops up Rajat Kapoor, a bearded streetside shill, claiming to cure syphilis for a tenner, his very look putting the 'pot' in apothecary.

This ragtag version of The Bard's Oberon is convinced his pretty wife (Tisca Chopra) -- who is rather popular around the neighbourhood -- has many a lover tucked away. Now, in the hands of these performers, the language sputters to life, flavour ringing authentic as man-wife-mother-neighbour verbally snipe at each other.

And it is in these words, words seemingly from another age, that lie the film's charm. In the way spices are stored in old bottles of antacid, in the way the name Agra is meant to invoke the loony bin, in the casual stammering and scolding and the way women exaggeratedly gasp out the 'haw.'

Here we also find the film's finest line, sold to us by a strong actress with tiny screen-time but impressive, impactful screen presence called Rasika Duggal.

Playing a gossipy neighbour, she whinges about her neglectful husband's cricket-love, saying "Mujhse byah kyon kiya, Irfan Pathan ko hi ghar le aate." ("Why marry me and not just bring home Irfan Pathan?" It isn't a particularly amazing line, but Duggal knocks it out of the park, and the film appears to have turned a corner.

Unfortunately, despite interesting nuances, the same words flounder in the inexpert hands of the other principal characters like Purab Kohli, Neil Bhoopalam and Koel Purie (though Tara Sharma does a bang-up<div class="clear">