Love can’t possibly be that bad. Though every time someone proposes in Chennai Love Story—twice, really, but it feels like two times too much—the characters weep as though handed a diagnosis of terminal illness. Their bodies heave, struck by anxiety. They turn away from the lover proclaiming love. They can’t stop crying. Love, really, must be that bad.
When the film opens, in Jandrapeta, Nivedita (Sri Gouri Priya) is left at the altar by Ajay (Thrigun). After two years of friendship and three years of a long-distance relationship with Ajay in Bengaluru and Nivedita in Chennai, Ajay absconds. Heartbroken, Nivi returns to Chennai, back to work, living with her friends. Sad, she becomes an alcoholic—because how else do writers and directors with no depth of human experience show heartbreak on the big screen? She downs bottles of whiskey and gin alternately, adding some to her water bottle, which she carries to work. Like an appendage, it is always in her reach. High-functioning alcoholic? Check. Though the film never lets her slur and stumble in these portions. Perhaps, she is a micro-doser. Perhaps, she has a great tolerance. Neither is essential to the story, but when a film begins to feel so familiar, you try to invent details.
At a seaside bar, they run into Steven Shankar (Kiran Abbavaram), an orphan who is trying to make it in the Chennai film world. He gifted himself this name—Steven Spielberg + Shankar. Unfortunate names to memorialise at a time when both released their most underwhelming works.
Steven narrates his screenplay to anyone who can listen—Simbu’s makeup man? Sure. Strangers he has just met? Sure. That could help. Nivedita’s friends see Steven and call him over to their table. They are all Telugus in Tamil Nadu—there must be some instinct for community, perhaps? The way Malayalis in Bengaluru and Hyderabad were shown in Bangalore Days (2014) and Premalu (2024). Not really. The Chennai here doesn’t feel foreign enough for their shared Telugu-ness to feel like a respite. Chennai, instead, becomes a stock backdrop—a temple here, a beach there, a train here, a church there, with neither the texture of the city nor its unique chaos. The beach scenes are so confected, with their flat lighting and clean compositions, that it felt like the waves belonged to a studio.
The friends essentially adopt Steven, who stays with them. Nivedita finds him irritating and his wide-eyed innocence off-putting. When he oversteps in caring for her, she rips him a big one, but feeling bad, does him a huge favour, getting his foot in the door with P Vasu, the noted director playing himself.
In deep gratitude, Steven calls her his goddess and him, her slave. He means it. He will turn every wish of hers into fulfilment. You cannot spell slave without love. No wait. That’s not it. Nivedita is smitten. The film is convinced it is love, and in a sudden moment we don’t see in the rear view mirror, she proposes they marry. It is sprung so suddenly, so abruptly into the film, I could only wonder how the film was going to squander this marriage.
That squandering is what lay ahead, the remaining two hours of this exhausting three-hour weep-fest. You can see the film trying to reach out into a new, refreshing mode of storytelling, outgrowing previous generations’ starchy staging. The references to Mani Ratnam—the Mouna Ragam poster against a scene which mirrors the death of Karthik in that film; the reverse slow-motion shots of Alaipayuthey; the fish and fermenting eros of OK Kanmani—and the nostalgia for Ilayaraaja feel like they would moderate the film’s innately harsh impulses.
But how can a film transcend its DNA? The images of the waist and the starchy dialogues remain—I am your world, etc. The cloying family dynamics are replaced with equally cloying, but infinitely more grating, gestures—putting your hands together to form a heart. The obsession with virginity is strange. More troubling is the sudden ushering in of sexual assault. Without context, as a plot to raise the film’s stakes. Much like giving alcoholism to a heartbroken character is a sign of a dim-witted writerly imagination, so is the forced inclusion of sexual assault to mitigate narrative ennui. Can they not imagine a woman’s story being complicated without putting her body through the wringer? Poor Sri Gouri Priya, stuck in a role that expects the world out of her, but giving her little to play with. One lover leaves her at the altar, and the other stares at her the minute she wakes up, waiting to be directed. What can the poor thing do? Love really is the worst.