Familiar ideas, weak lead characters and stretched-out storytelling make #Love far less romantic than intended, observes Sreeju Sudhakaran.
IMAGE: Arjun Das and Aishwarya Lekshmi in #Love.
Key Points
- #Love revolves around Tara and Matthew, whose rival dating apps champion compatibility and chemistry respectively, setting up the central romantic conflict.
- Despite a promising premise and stylish presentation, the series stretches a predictable wager with frustrating characters, contrived complications and repetitive dating-app antics.
- Aishwarya Lekshmi and Arjun Das are perfectly alright in the lead roles, but the writing fails to make their characters or romantic dilemmas sufficiently relatable and lived-in.
#Love, directed by Balaji Mohan and produced by Soundarya Rajinikanth, is a romcom series with one favourable quality: It does not drag on for too long.
The show clocks in at six episodes, most of which clocking with half an hour. There is a catch, though.
This is just the first season, leaving half the story dangling in the air. Because it is a streaming show, right? You apparently need at least two seasons to stretch out a plot that could have easily been wrapped up in four episodes or a standard feature film.
You know a happy ending is lurking somewhere, but the show simply refuses to give you the satisfaction of reaching it. You have to wait for another season just to watch two incredibly clueless people figure out whether they want to be friends, hook up, or get married.
Dating Apps And Tired Tropes
#Love is supposedly a modern romantic comedy, with ‘modern’ meaning it revolves entirely around dating apps. I am not entirely sure if focusing on apps that have been in circulation for over a decade makes the show particularly trendy.
The hashtag in the title certainly does not help the wannabe vibe, while the actual clichés used in here date back to at least three decades of Hollywood romcoms.
The story centres on Tara (Aishwarya Lekshmi) and Matthew (Arjun Das), who are involved in rival dating platforms with completely opposite ideologies that perfectly mirror their own personas.
Tara is the CEO of Found, an app that is desperately struggling to attract financiers. Tara, who does not believe much in casual flings, firmly thinks relationships only work through sheer compatibility.
Her app strictly decides if two people are a good match based on an 85 percent compatibility score. Hey, wait a minute! Did Love Insurance Kompany not feature a similar app that caused a romantic rift between its lead couple?
It is quite funny to realise this protagonist thinks she has built something revolutionary, when it is basically just a BharatMatrimony portal that refuses to use the word ‘matrimony’. I am pretty sure among the thousand probing questions the app asks its users (which even the characters troll), there are definitely a few casually checking for ‘caste’ and ‘religion’.
Tara is also such a devoted CEO that she blindly trusts her app’s algorithm to decide her own love life rather than following her heart, relying on an algorithm she can literally manipulate at any time. Devoted or just dumb? I will let you decide.
Boring Wager
Enough about Tara.
Let us talk about the story’s other frustrating lead: Matthew. He does not actually run the app Find Me Bae but is its primary investor.
Both the app and Matthew believe relationships must start with an instant spark, and that spark comes purely from chemistry. For all his grand talk about chemistry, Matthew cannot find the right woman because he simply cannot find that elusive spark. Never mind that a spark was clearly not needed for any of his countless one-night stands up to that point.
Matthew is also your classic ‘poor’ rich kid saddled with problems that demand the absolute bare minimum of your empathy. The lad is a nepo baby with a mom who passed away early and a successful father who indulges him with money and influence, both of which he hates.
He has also become a viral sensation for all the wrong reasons after a video of his rock-climbing accident blew up online. So yes, please do some boo hoo for how disappointed he is with life.
Matthew finally finds his spark when he bumps into Tara at an awards show. They hit it off on the hotel rooftop and immediately start debating the core competencies of their rival apps: Chemistry versus compatibility.
Before you know it, they strike a convenient wager. If Matthew finds true love through Tara’s app within 60 days, he will invest in Found. Likewise, Tara has to test out his app and see if she can find a genuine match based entirely on chemistry.
It does not take a tech genius to figure out exactly how #Love will play out this wager. Instead of simply hooking up and dealing with their obvious attraction once and for all, we have to endure them testing out the apps in the most incredibly unentertaining ways possible before they figure out Real Life is supposed to be their best dating app.
Apart from a montage of unsuitable candidates and a small commentary on creeps that use these apps, #Love doesn’t do much to offer any insightful critique of the dating app culture. Or attempt be a fun romcom, that involves actual romantic scenes or good humour, or even good chemistry between the two leads.
Instead, the protagonists, particularly Tara, constantly drag their manufactured complexities into the mix purely to forcefully delay the conclusion and trap us in a sheer exercise of dating tedium.
Uninspired Subplots, Weak Writing
If that is not enough, #Love clumsily throws in romantic rivals for both of them. We get Mrithula (Gayathri Hariharan), an NRI chef exploring local cuisines and who stays at Tara’s house (that she has let out as B&B), who starts falling for Matthew despite knowing his lingering feelings for Tara.
Then there is Harish (Arjun Chidambaram), a drummer whose feelings are selfishly misused by Tara simply so she does not cave to her own emotions for Matthew. Honestly, why are we even rooting for this lead pair to end up together?
There are also other subplots centring on Tara’s two close associates. Sylvia (Harini S) is the ‘success story’ of the app, married to her algorithm-approved match, only to realise the magic has vanished from her marriage. She later indulges in a deep friendship with another man which she hides from her friends and her husband. Guess no one told her of ’emotional cheating’.
Then there is Arun (Kiran), whose track might have been slightly more interesting had it aired a decade earlier: A closeted gay man unwilling to commit to a relationship and terrified of coming out to his parents.
When you place all these convenient puzzle pieces together, it is not exactly hard to deduce how their personal dilemmas will eventually shatter Tara’s stubborn ideals.
In the end, you just know both Tara and Matthew will figure out that chemistry and compatibility are never enough on their own. You also need an immense amount of patience. Oh, sorry, that last part was meant for the viewers.
But by the time you reach that conclusion, the show has already smugly promised a second season. Dammit!
In the lead roles, Arjun Das and Aishwarya Lekshmi are quite alright. The best thing they can take away from this show is that they are constantly presented in stylish and urbane costuming. The frames looks pleasing and Sean Roldan’s score, likewise.
What they really should have craved for was better writing. They needed a script that made their characters more relatable, made their rich-kid or tech-bro problems genuinely felt, and made their romantic dilemmas seem authentically lived-in, or at least celebrate or even smartly critique the frivolous nature of modern dating app culture.
#Love streams on Netflix.
#Love Review Rediff Rating:
