“What’s a love story without a little conflict?” a radio jockey declares casually over a live conversation with his wife in Prime Video’s Love Storiyaan. The rhetorical question kind of underpins and queries the origin of storytelling. What makes a good love story? The layers of subversion, the ease of its culmination, the prospects of its future or quite simply the unlikelihood of it ever happening? For a cinema culture bred on a staple of love-against-all-odds, a good love story usually echoes the sentimentality of a daunting conquest. The kind that can’t really exist without the looming threat of institutional repression of one form or the other. Love Storiyaan, a term coined in a song from Dharma’s Brahmastra: Part One is a lovingly made docu-series about unlikely ever-afters, endurance and faith.
Six stories make up this anthology of short docs inspired by the popular Instagram page India Love Project founded by Priya Ramani, Samar Halarnkar & Niloufer Venkatraman. It says something about the curative powers of the internet that it has managed to drag relatively obscure stories about intimacy, predominantly set in the pre-smartphone era, into the national conscience. Love Storiyaan, is merely the audio-visual contraption that adapts these Instagram stories to the somewhat elastic medium of film. At roughly 30 minutes an episode, these are warm, life-affirming stories of resistance, belief and this indefinable quality of being just the right amount of mad that we call love.
Helmed by young independent directors, these six stories circle compassion and love’s ability to wipe prejudice off of society’s foggy mirrors. The first story is a rather urban prologue about a Punjabi divorcee mother of two daughters finding companionship in the arms of a Keralite journalist. Bridging the divide of culture is one thing, but to bridge that barrier between second chances and first leaps is lovingly, if expectedly crafted. There are similar stories here between couples who have reached across divides of faith, politics and ethnicity to offer this intercut but thankfully liberal road map of life’s boringly upright highways. There is at least adventure, mischief, strife and the subsequent joy of eloping with a rare sense of freedom in the paths less taken.
Possibly the best story of the lot comes in the second episode, where two Meghalaya based radio jockeys working for rival stations, find love through a common, blind listener. It’s the kind of narrative bliss that simply can’t be cracked open in writing rooms anymore. We simply don’t experience spaces, politics, conversations and society the same way. We are a generation wired into the curated blindness of internet algorithms. The algorithm of life is much more unpredictable, reckless and joyously shapeless. It’s these stories of happenstance that give it a sort of geometry, a map to maybe remember and retrace it by. Love may not be reconcilable to definition, but it can be framed as the language of empathy, of forgiveness and most importantly, rebellion.
Love Storiyaan affirms that a good love story is made by the hurdles it crosses. "The end" is merely a viewing point from where the beginning looks distant, improbable and miraculous. The meeting point of two people, however, is only the ingredient. Miracles have to be seeded, nourished and at times protected with the wherewithal of an incurable itch. Or better still, an infection. To which effect, Love Storiyaan which has been produced by Dharma Productions’ streaming arm Dharmatic Entertainment, is also a welcome elongation of the second innings of life, where it explores familial trajectories, marital discord, difficult reunions and the prospect that despite the dizzying quality of coincidence, charm and romance love extracts a cost. A cost that often gets swept under the candyfloss packaging of cinematic grandeur (something Dharma can consider itself guilty of).
It’s really hard to go wrong with a format that comes with the sugary promise of sentiment enmeshed in this complicated wiring of politics; politics of gender, class, religion and of societal impressions. To unclog an imprecise sentiment’s depthless quality, all a storyteller can really do is change his views of seeing. Not that stories that haven’t scaled mountains of conflict, are any less authentic, but there is this underdog character to a story that feels fanciful, even as a modern-day construct. We might be swiping right with aplomb, but love still requires this otherworldly resilience to be able to become, however flawed, the image it wants to be.
Love Storiyaan has the look and feel of an indie film, the visual language of a postcard and the etiquette of a good listener. But it also has this streak of performative innocence that obscures as much as it reveals. This after all is a celebration of victory, of winning against the odds. Odds that continue to sadly define the who, how and where of our own emotional existence. That, however, is a question for a different kind of cinematic endeavour. For a Valentine’s Day lozenge that sooths the hoarse, inner voice of dejection and maybe even defeat, this is a welcome toast to hard-won triumphs.
Love Storiyaan is now streaming on Prime Video.
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