Of course, there’ve been films like Badhaai Do, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, and Manmarziyan in the recent past, but none that you could recall, have created the kind of mushy, but ultimately sweeping magic of the 90s or the 70s. Much like Bollywood itself, romance as a genre in Hindi cinema is trying to find its footing, an identifiable template between realism and fancy, between woke-ness and disarming bliss. A lot of this may have to do with general awareness around consent, of how modern relationships work for one. When Isha runs off to Shiva’s home, despite knowing him for barely a few moments, I was wondering not about how exciting it is, but about how unsafe it might be. When Shiva jumps into an elevator in order to meet Isha, because it’s a classic case of love-at-first-sight, I wasn’t jumping at the sight of how blatant that act of commitment was, but how creepy it would feel to me in the real world. However, while getting the politics and intersectionality of romance is imperative it is also true, that many of us, including myself, are in search of those stories that you wish to lose yourself to. For any fluffy, cheesy and soppy love story to work, there has to be the conviction to make it look plausible, despite the evident disbelief. Not everyone, it is evident can sell or frame this story the way Hindi cinema did with stunning regularity. Something, that has clearly become a bit of a hill to climb recently.Are love stories a thing of the past? Is romance truly dead? Are social comedies, and virile magnum opus’ the new genre du jour for Indian entertainment, with romance taking a step back for a change?
Ranbir Kapoor’s earnestness does not compensate for his inability to carry inane antics and sloppy writing on charm alone. Another rather important facet of love stories is their competency to empower a woman’s emotional side, as Shahrukh Khan said in an interview, about why his love stories worked in what was possibly the golden period of Bollywood romances. In Brahmastra, Isha is limited to becoming a tool for Shiva’s adventures, rather than emotional sounding board that should shape his trajectory. This, in a film that wants to argue that love is the greatest superpower of all, is all the more baffling. In Brahmastra, love could’ve been the antidote to the machismo that superhero films usually parade, but it ends up being an annoying distraction from the real matters at hand – the astraverse. It makes you ponder whether it is a fantasy film or an urban love story lost in the Himalayas by chance. While the technical prowess of the film shines, it consequently undermines the emotional heft of a relationship that is more than just a casting coincidence of course. So is the romance just too old-school, or have we given up on it?When Isha runs off to Shiva’s home, despite knowing him for barely a few moments, I was wondering not about how exciting it is, but about how unsafe it might be.
I think it’s a bit of both, after all, for love stories to do their magic, in today’s day and age, maybe the wand has to be flicked with a lot more modesty than it used to. The days of practically willing people into relationships are gone, and it takes a lot more to convince us about love, about attraction at first sight, not to mention the gender politics that comes after. The audience has matured, and so has the world. It doesn’t necessarily mean we are more cynical, or deny love the way it was offered to us previously. It just means we want to be seen better, wiser and most importantly, equally, in the stories we see.The days of practically willing people into relationships are gone, and it takes a lot more to convince us about love, about attraction at first sight, not to mention the gender politics that comes after.
