Modern Love on Amazon Prime is back with a second season, and thankfully so. In a world plagued with dissatisfaction, pain and the loss of love and life, especially in the trying times of COVID-19, that seem not to end, a feel-good escape is much needed and welcome.
Modern Love is as much about New York as it is about New Yorkers, a show with a slew of diverse, non mainstream, almost fringe love stories, that hardly find screen time in mainstream Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter.
The world of brown, rust, metal and glass sky scrapers of the city, busy, bustling and noisy streets with endless variety, each turn and corner a new universe within itself. Woollen scarves, coats, boots and jackets with endless cups of steaming takeaway coffee, wine bars, wood oven pizzas and charming, tiny apartments leading up from idyllic streets and onto adventurous back alleys full of characters from a fairytale.
The people are coloured, sometimes racially ambiguous, their sexuality, genders, ages, preferences, likes and dislikes, all a mixed bag. They’re writers, teachers, painters, editors and even old women and teenagers, wading through the waters of adolescent mayhem to come to understand life and love, alike - New York City, ladies and gentlemen. The people are imperfect in just the perfect ways, bent at the corners, dog eared and perhaps damaged just enough to be quirky and loveable, never dangerous or toxic. The show is, while rooted in realism, a utopian vision of what a diverse world, full of love and acceptance, should look like. Most of us know, though, that the real world is not quite like that and therein lies the magic of such sweet, sentimental fiction, that is able to ask pertinent questions of its viewers, about representation, the subaltern and compassion, but can yet provide a safe, soft, cosy, wine tinted escape in the arms of a true blue urban Goliath - New York City.
The gaze the show offers, is a sympathetic one, where everyone from the student, to the housewife, the doorman to the construction worker, is essentially a golden person living a life of personal struggle, which one will, of course, ultimately overcome, learn from and find his or her happiness.
It is a show about catharsis and offers neatly wrapped happy endings, and it works.
The show is philosophical, in the way of Rumi’s poetry, that it addresses big things - love, death, loss, mental health and more and offers hints of magic realism and folklore - a girl who can only stay awake all night and sleep all day, best friends for whom time flows back and forth and then back again with the ease of water, teenage lesbian love that fuels and sustains sudden maddening passions, forcing children to act on the adrenaline of young love, ex lovers running into each other on the street and within those moments of crossing each other, their entire brief and disappointing encounter is lived through for the rest of us, through both their eyes, the pain of a parent who sees their child go through growing pains as all kids do and can do nothing about it but lend a shoulder to the heartbreaking sobbing that lonely children are capable of - you have it all.
Each of the stories are different from one another, in their content and treatment, but are tied together by the overriding theme of it all - love.
Between the long, tasteful scenes of people kissing tenderly, staring into each others eyes, crying tears of joy, we are reminded of the heroes and heroines from a Jane Austen novel almost, strong men and women, being human.
Written and directed by multiple people, the entire run of the season is done wonderfully. Each episode's treatment, the direction, the music, even the cinematography changes ever so slightly, unbeknownst to the naked eye, based on the content and context of the story, aiding each episode to be powerful and impactful, a unique story and take in its own right and a functioning part of a larger ensemble. When the themes are of teenage love, the camera moves fast, bumpy, the anxiety and energy of youth captured. When the story is about a middle-aged doctor, dealing with the monotony of middle age and an old marriage, both the camera and the gaze are calmer, slower, less excited. The script for each episode is crisp and laden with story, character, themes and world, making each half an hour episode a full entire seven course meal.
Most romantic comedies from the recent past are hammy, boring tinkering on stereotypes, like Jawaani Janeman, and / or are bad copies of older versions of themselves, like the unnecessary Coolie No.1. Some others try to be about love and romance but are ultimately about pornographic sex between two unrealistically plastic characters. It’s tedious.
A show like Modern Love should perhaps inspire more people to write and make romantic comedies and romantic dramas, a genre that has been for so long told in almost the same way through almost the same characters, that it has so much to be discovered, just waiting, seething.
We have only seen the tip of the ice berg. Love is, as Modern Love tells us, the driving force and factor in most of our lives. The love for our partners, children, jobs, parents or even money, love is the single most powerful force of nature and shows like Modern Love open a door to explore love, unlike it has been explored for the most part, in most of cinematic history and can maybe, just maybe change your personal life a little if you watch closely enough and unlearn the things that hold you back from opening your heart to one another. Modern Love reminds us that, in the end, after all the fights are fought and wars are won, after all the politics and hate and victimhood and savagery and fascism, all that there will be and all that there should be is, of course, love .
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