Love is a risk we endure. In a sense, then, love stories become thrillers where the stakes are not of life, but of the self—will the self survive love? For love turns stone-faced, gruff voiced men into pouty mush pots and softens the hardened boundaries of women—you almost don’t recognise people in love. Love ruptures the self, and something new emerges out of it. The best love stories, then, tease out this tension, this emergence, and revel in it, goad it further, while the worst think of this tension, this emergence, as reluctant plot pushers.
#Love enthusiastically slots itself in the latter category. Uninterested in the people themselves, salivating over “conflicts”—forced villains, forced mirage-like sub-plots, forced binaries, forced altercations, forced confessions. It is like the show is dragging people by their neck and pushing them through the plot. It has forgotten the joys of reveling. It is another kind of thriller, where what is at stake is not the self, but storytelling itself. In the end, nothing survives. Neither story, nor character, nor love.
Tara Krishnan (Aishwarya Lekshmi) is the CEO of Found, an app that matches people based on how compatible they are. The compatibility itself is matched by AI based on your answers to questions — what is the perfect proposal, for example. Matthew Jebraj (Arjun Das) is the investor in Find My Bae, the rival app that matches people based on how much chemistry they have, based on your answers to their questions — what is your favourite colour, for example, or sex position. Hum app-ke hai kaun?
If the story of the tirelessly entrepreneurial woman falling in love with a man of extraordinary money, who will eventually come and save both her business and her sinking heart sounds familiar (Think Royals), then, strap on, because while The Royals at least had the audacity to make the flirtation erotic and the courting charged, here, you have the two lovers exchanging long-winded word vomit — and not as a kink. If there is any audacity in #Love, it is in its desire to end in false diversions, promising a second season, when it could barely deliver a first.
Matthew is immediately smitten and wants to also be a silent investor in Tara’s app, since it is floundering. He also wants to take her out on a date. They pose a challenge. Sixty days — Matthew will use Found and Tara will use Find My Bae. If Matthew finds someone, Tara wins, and Matthew will invest. If not, she goes on a date with Matthew.
The show frames compatibility and chemistry as a binary. “There is no fire without a spark,” Matthew tells Tara, to which she replies, “There is no spark without the right combination of elements.” Now, you see the problem here. It is not the stupidity of the binary itself — which, fine, we don’t want a rigorous theory of the heart. But it is how this stupidity is framed — stupidly. I suppose what they were really trying to go for is frame Find My Bae as a hook-up app and Found as a dating app, but they did not have the clarity or courage to make that distinction clear — sex vs love. So, instead, they settled for chemistry vs compatibility. It is cowardice written all over a love story that is afraid to touch on lust as a valid alternative to love.
This is the problem with this show. It wants to be cool, but it tries so hard, it forgets that coolness really emerges from the lack of trying; it is not something you can tailor. Cool is a posture that can’t be assumed. Besides, the dating app is not just a place to validate desire. It is also where desire is formed. It is where you recognise what you could possibly want, or not want. Today, from Feeld, where you can find couples for a threesome, to Hinge, where you can exchange sweet nothings over coffee, the digital dating landscape is so vast and unfamiliar that it is pathetic to see a show still grappling with the most anodyne version of it. Why are we playing peek-a-boo when the adults in the room are clearly playing spin the bottle?
Squeeze and wring the show and you won’t find one drop of wit, or charm, leaking. The only hope of getting a wind-swept romance is when Matthew’s helicopter is summoned in an emergency, where the two are locked in a terrace. Eros is completely absent. As is intensity. Or even something as vague and simple as yearning.
Lekshmi has the distinction of working in one of India’s finest romantic films — Mayaanadhi — and Arjun Das has his voice, all baritone, whiskey-soaked, and together, they really try and fill out their meekly written characters. You would think the show would build on their presence, but instead it merely uses their presence as a crutch to tell this limp love story. In fact, it reduces them as actors. You might have seen actors elevate mediocre material. Here, you get to see mediocre material drag down actors. Both Das and Lekshmi can’t afford to be good actors here.
Tara’s colleagues are given plots unto themselves — one is a gay man trying to rip out of the closet, and the other is in a secure but boring relationship, flirting with adultery. Both plots are framed with such a lightweight touch that they get resolved quickly, before the stakes even manage to find their weight.
There are also musicians who pepper the show — a guy Tara dates, Matthew’s sister, another pop-star who pops in randomly, having met his lover on Tara’s app — but there is no patience for a single, full song, peppered as it is over scenes, haphazardly. Love stories in Indian cinema is music. The revelry, the lyrical excess of feeling, the twinge in the heart — it is all music. But yanking it away from the story, turning #Love into some bland montage of coming together and apart, the show is testament to a loveless landscape. No love lost here.