What happens when a Punjabi and a Marxist walk into a bar? Prime Video’s latest series Love Storiyaan unpacks the making of a lover

The episodes feature broken people, failed marriages, lovers torn apart by violence, lovers grappling with addiction and the real possibility of love eventually fizzling out. Lovers can find their way home, sure, but where do we find lovers to begin with?

Episode after episode, Love Storiyaan examines–and questions– who exactly a ‘good lover’ is, if such a concept exists anyway. Can an alcoholic, notorious as a flirt in his community, who is coming off a failed marriage make for a wonderful partner to another woman? Can a mother of two have an affair over the internet? Can a rich, spoilt boy, interested only in the college notes of a girl, cross borders and rebel against family? Can an idealistic activist love like a hopeless romantic? Can a lover blossom in the shadow of a gun? Can one, who was never truly seen, make the other visible?

 

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What Love Storiyaan manages to do is a triumph in the age of increasingly piercing gaze of the internet, where every ‘unconventional’ relationship–or at least the circumstances around it– is quickly given a label. The nauseating and deeply myopic idea of painting people, and sometimes complex birth of their relationships, as ‘red flags’ is turned on its head on the show, especially in the segments helmed by Hardik Mehta (An Unsuitable Girl), Vivek Soni (Love on Air), Akshay Indikar (Raah Sangharsh Ki) and Collin D’Cunha (Love Beyond Labels).

If some of the lovers in Love Storiyaan were simply anonymous Twitter users detailing the initial phase of their relationship or the magnetic pull of getting drawn to a person, who doesn’t tick every single box of being a ‘green-flag’, they would have been trolled and their equation judged. Can a Brahmin truly fall for a Dalit or is it a saviour complex? Can a known flirt really be loyal? Can a man from a conservative country be with a woman with agency? Love Storiyaan neatly unpacks these questions as it presents answer with a simplistic love eventually wins narrative, told through the lives of lovers who lose a lot yet keep at it.

Love Storiyaan’s biggest win comes in the ensemble of its directors. There is everything for everyone, love packaged in different forms of movie making. If Hardik Mehta and Vivek Soni deliver the show’s most commercial mini movies– laced with moments of genuine charm, wit and a beating heart–Akshay Indikar presents a stunning blend of documentary-like filmmaking with touches of grand cinematic staging. His docu soars whenever it stays with the subjects, letting them be, rather than getting overwhelmed with the setting.

If Collin D’Cunha packs an assured, sensitively told and intimately shot segment with a flair of a filmmaker who knows how to build a sweeping tale, Archana Phadke with her segment Faasley pieces archival footages of a country in turmoil to give viewers a more inwards reflection of the discomfort of a distance.

But the best short of the show is by Shazia Iqbal, a filmmaker in remarkable form in her segment Homecoming. The episode, about two lovers settled in India revisiting their native country Bangladesh, from where they had to be uprooted for the sake of their love, powers through with cinematic excellence.

Co-directed by Rahul Badwelkar, Homecoming is the series’ Veer Zara– about lovers meeting and waiting, crossing borders, revisiting their past and imagining their future. It is humane, sharply political and deeply romantic. What also works in Homecoming is the minimal use of re-enactments, as Shazia lets the focus constantly be on the couple. When she does use actors to give a glimpse of how the couple could have been in their past, it leads to a rousing, musical climax straight out of a big screen Hindi film.

It may not all add up entirely, and some bits may fall short of expectations, but Love Storiyaan rides on the ambition to love in the times of hate, to commit in the era of ghosting. There is history and chemistry, it is personal and political. What’s not to like in a series which asks a simple question- What happens when a Punjabi and a Marxist walk into a bar? Of course, you know it by now. They fall in love.