In my three decades or so of movie-watching, epic romances have often turned out to be epic fails. Mega-hits like Devdas , Mughal-e-Azam , Veer-Zaara (and the various Hollywood counterparts), in all their larger-than-life Yash Chopra-Karan Johar glory, left me cold.
For a while, I put it down to being a little cold-hearted, not easily given to mush. But why then did the quiet little love stories in Chupke Chupke, Chashme Baddoor , Chhoti Si Baat move me? Perhaps it wasn’t me. Perhaps it was the idea that leaving matters of the heart to ‘fate’ and ‘god’ (or a dog!) seemed ridiculously confounding even if one were to suspend disbelief.
Love happens between two people: why does the entire universe have to get involved?
So my (apparent) stoneheart fluttered wildly in delight as I watched a series of updated love stories bloom in halls once again this year.
Love 2.0 came alive in Toilet: Ek Prem Katha , Bareilly Ki Barfi , Shubh Mangal Saavdhan , Running Shaadi, Meri Pyaari Bindu and others, which have few traces of warring and disapproving families, rich boy-poor girl (or vice-versa), extramarital affairs, or young men with commitment phobia.
Woman on top
Instead, we have in Toilet a woman and a man who find love but have to temporarily separate because the woman refuses to accept his family’s inability to provide a bathroom.
We have a woman who finds her idea of a perfect partner in the pages of a book and so goes looking for the writer ( Bareilly ki Barfi ).
Then we have a couple who navigate uncomfortable truths about their sexual relationship, where the woman leads all the way ( Shubh Mangal Saavdhan ).
As Navjot Gulati, co-writer of Running Shaadi, a messy love story of an adventure-seeking Punjaban Nimmi and a restrained Bihari Bharose, tells me: “Love stories in the modern world are like iPhones, they keep getting updated every year yet they are the same.”
These love stories do what any good love story should, and more, mirroring the sticky terrain of real life romances without sugar-coating. They speak today’s language, going micro rather than macro, and put the woman firmly in focus, as someone who makes her own decisions.
The men, for their part, prove to be interesting foils, more passive than active for large parts of the film, but rising to the occasion ultimately.
“Real life stories are messy, have a lot of back and forth, and that’s something I realised after writing this film. This was the only way we would have wanted to tell this story, love at first sight is a concept that is passé,” says Gulati, who worked with director Amit Roy on the script and believes that for a love story to work today, it has to be relatable and in keeping with the times.
He cries, she doesn’t
The magic lurks in the way the characters have been written: In Toilet , Bhumi Pednekar’s Jaya teases Akshay Kumar’s Keshav for being 36 but not mature enough to stand up to his father. She also chews his ear off for following her around with his sidekicks (but then strangely follows it up by stalking him).
In Meri Pyaari Bindu , set in Kolkata and Mumbai, Ayushmann Khurrana’s Abhimanyu Roy is tender, his deep affection for neighbour Parineeti Chopra’s Bindu most obvious. But she holds back as she isn’t quite sure she is in love. He lets his tears flow easily, she doesn’t.
When they get together some years later, he springs a proposal, but she puts her foot down. She cannot go along with his 2-BHK-in-Matunga-and-two-kids plan. “I can’t do this Abhi, it’s too much. I can’t deal with this... I feel suffocated,” says Bindu, as she packs up and relocates to Bengaluru.
Shubh Mangal Saavdhan , meanwhile, begins with Bhumi Pednekar’s Sugandha declaring (as a montage of a typical Delhi wedding fills the frame): “To tell the truth, I don’t like the idea of a showsha wedding at all. From the time I was a kid, I wanted to elope and get married: fight with the parents, run away on a bike in the middle of the night, racing on a highway with my lover, a bag with some clothes and a lifelong promise of love.”
Gents problem
At the end, Sugandha and her man of choice Mudit do not elope, but they do everything else rather unconventionally. A woman with her own mind, Sugandha inspires Mudit, through her love and commitment, to stand up for himself, as they together break away from tradition, telling their parents off and telling everyone else to mind their own business. If there are troubles in the bedroom, it’s for them to figure it out, thank you very much. And Sugandha is as invested in Mudit’s “gents problem” as he is.
Love or arranged?
The film also subverts the concept of arranged marriage by calling it love-cum-arranged-cum-love marriage. I ask the writer of the film, Hitesh Kewalya, who grew up in a middle-class Delhi milieu, what was running through his mind when he wrote the film.
“Love-cum-arranged-cum-love is like my ode to this flexibility of our culture, where two people who fall in love don’t rebel for marriage, instead their parents arrange their marriage so it doesn’t sound ‘taboo’. It’s a way out of this social deadlock.” For him, this film, however, was more about “the sexual awakening of Sugandha and Mudit in a society where talking about sex and sexual desires is taboo.”
Other than addressing important social concerns that are so much a part of our relationships, the fabric of these love stories knits the dynamics of a boy-girl relationship into a typical romantic comedy.
“It’s a subversion of a family film, a subversion of a macho film, a subversion of a damsel in distress film, a subversion of a marriage film,” explains Kewalya.
The writer is a freelance journalist, lover of cakes, chai, bookshops and good yarns.
