Film Companion
Last Updated: 05.03 PM, Sep 02, 2022
“Listen your boy Puri is a romance reader or what?”
There’s a lot wrong with this message that a friend sent me while watching Liger (2022). Firstly, director Puri Jagannadh, aged 55, is not my — or presumably anyone else’s — boy by any stretch of the imagination. Secondly, given the storytelling choices Jagannadh has made as a director, it seems fair to assume he’s not a reader of romances. Romances can showcase machismo as much as the next action hero, but the genre has also evolved to become one of those few elements in popular culture that places women and their desires front and centre (this tends to work out better on paper than on screen, but more on that later). Jagannadh’s films have the opposite priority. It’s all about the hero, which is evident from the fact that Vijay Deverakonda is in practically every scene in Liger.
And yet, it turns out that there are significant similarities between one romance novel in particular and Liger. Allow me to introduce you to Lyssa Kay Adams’s The Bromance Book Club — about a group of bros who have a secret club in which they read romances — starring a baseball player named Gavin Scott (and his wife, Thea). Gavin and Liger are both professional athletes. Both of them have a tendency to punch men they don’t like. Most importantly, both are viciously mocked for having a stutter. The difference isn’t just that Adams has an actual story to tell while Jagannadh’s film is a series of fight sequences strung together. It’s also that Adams wants to set up her hero and heroine as deserving of one another. Liger, on the other hand, only cares about establishing the hero as heroic by using brute strength. Liger’s stutter is played for comedy – we’re encouraged to laugh each time Deverakonda opens his mouth and struggles to complete a word — while the fact that others laugh at him is presented as justification for Liger to go ballistic. In The Bromance Book Club, Gavin’s stammer also lays the ground for the book’s hero moment, but in a very different way. When a group of gossips snigger and wonder whether Gavin’s mouth also fails him when he has sex, his wife Thea steps out of the shadows and says, “For your information, yes, Gavin stutters in bed. And it’s f***ing beautiful.” It’s a moment that establishes Thea as a firecracker and makes Gavin look like a stud, establishing both of them as strong characters in their own way. It also makes you want to see the two of them tangling tongues (and other body parts). There is no such moment in Liger.
Usually, I would say it’s more laudable to have a failed original idea than it is to develop a good imitation. However, when it comes to Liger, we may all have been happier if Jagannadh had faithfully copied The Bromance Book Club, which is mostly nonsensical and very enjoyable. Who knows? Liger might even have had a better run at the box office.
In the recent past, everyone had written off the romantic comedy, or rom com. Audiences seemed to prefer action movies and it was pointed out that rom coms were inane and unrealistic (as though the stunts in every hero-led blockbuster are grounded in intelligence and realism). Leaving aside audience preferences, which are fickle, the lack of respect for romances has everything to do with the genre being seen as feminine. Action hopes to please those who identify as male and society accords more respect to everything associated with being manly. More is invested in wooing the target audience when it’s male and so from money to storytelling talent, more goes into making the tropes of action films work. Consequently, they look cooler and more credible even though the idea of a hero surviving those jumps and car crashes is about as rooted in realism as the idea of love at first sight.
There is, of course, some truth to the criticism levelled at rom coms. Accuracy and logic are not among the genre’s guiding principles. Some can feel painfully regressive in the way they insist on conventional beauty ideals. Also, the idea that a woman needs a partner to feel complete is laughable. However, there’s a central premise that unites all romances, across media, and it redeems even the most conservative of plots. A romance is set in a universe that remoulds itself to make sure a woman gets what she wants — whether that is the impossibly-delicious man she encounters in a meet cute, or professional success in a gender-agnostic workplace, or being seen as beautiful. In these stories, the women aren’t more powerful than the men they encounter. They’re the equals of their romantic counterparts (usually men). In a real world that sees women as weak or hates them for being strong, what the romance genre imagines is an alternative reality. You can only make this shit up.
At the moment, authors of romance novels are doing a better job than screenwriters of rom coms. Just look at writers like Adams, Talia Hibbert and Rosie Danan who regularly churn out romances full of wit, sass and progressive values. In sharp contrast are the regrettable romance movies that get dumped on our streaming platforms, like Love in the Villa and The Next 365 Days (both are available on Netflix). These films rely on good-looking faces and ignore minor details like plot and dialogue. In Love in the Villa, the heroine finds herself forced to share an apartment in Italy with a hunk. Instead of feeling any fear about being stuck in an unfamiliar house in a strange country with a strange man, our heroine curls up to get a good night’s sleep before proceeding to set a neighbourhood of cats on the hero. Later she does the housework — because domesticity is nothing to be ashamed of, y’all. (Be still my beating heart and hand me the jhadu.) Meanwhile, what is the hero doing to woo her? Guzzling wine. (Fair enough, though. I’d do the same if I found myself associated with a film as pointless as this one.) The highlight of The Next 365 Days, which continues its mission to serve all those who cannot access pornography, is that it seems to have finally run out of ideas for heterosexual coupling. This time, we got a dream sequence in which Laura imagines herself having a threesome — only for the two men to lock eyes with one another at one point and then start kissing passionately, forgetting all about Laura. It seems fair to assume being abandoned by her lovers mid-sex is not exactly the stuff of a woman’s fantasies. However, it’s about time the 365 Days franchise got queered, so cheers to that.
Yet despite all the awfulness that has been served up in the name of romance, the genre is returning as an audience favourite (perhaps as a reaction to all the action that we’ve been force-fed in recent years). Just look at the success of Thiruchitrambalam, which has made more than Rs 100 crore at the box office, and the fact that romance-led K-dramas consistently feature among Netflix India’s top 10 shows. For instance, Business Proposal, which finished airing in April, was among the most-watched shows on the streaming platform all the way till last month. Evidently the story about two young women who are driven to establish themselves professionally and two dishy young men who don’t mind playing second fiddle to the loves of their lives, struck a chord with Indian audiences.
Considering the high standard of writing in most K-dramas, Business Proposal is an exception. Its plot is simplistic and there’s an over-reliance on the cast’s charisma. The show is lucky to have actors like Kim Se-jeong, who made Shin Ha-ri an endearing heroine, and Lee Deok-hwa (he plays the drama-loving, sheet mask-wearing grandpa) because they lift a mediocre script. There are better examples of K-drama romances, like Run On and Crash Landing on You, and it’s heartening to know that these have been audience favourites because they offer data-based evidence that intelligent love stories have an audience.
Love in good K-dramas is complex, complicated and a reminder that like the leading ladies, we as individuals and as a society make choices that reflect how we see and value ourselves. The men the women settle for and then set aside, the career paths that they don’t have the courage to pursue and the opportunities that they finally claim are all portraits of contemporary society and its biases. We can thank patriarchy for making sure that the story of a woman in Seoul feels relatable to women across the world, from Mumbai to New York.
K-dramas are a rare example of a cultural product made for women into which money and talent are invested lavishly. Work goes into making these shows look good and making them attractive to the audience. However, more than the production budgets, the real aphrodisiac in K-dramas is the writing which gives voice to women, somewhat literally. They speak their thoughts and they’re heard, by both the universe as well as other characters. In My Liberation Notes, a frustrated and heartbroken Mi-jeong (Kim Ji-won), sick of being taken for granted and belittled, goes up to the swoonworthy Mr. Gu (Son Sukku) and says, “Worship me.” There’s as much intensity and sexiness in those two words as in the gorgeously-sensual orgiastic scene at the end of Sense8 even though My Liberation Notes is not technically a romance. In most good (and popular) K-dramas, the romance is a part of the larger story, and that larger story is the life of modern women. There’s always more to the female protagonist in a K-drama than her love story. There are other challenges to meet and dilemmas to solve, and the hero becomes a part of her complicated and messy life, instead of being the be-all and end-all. This dream of a life in which love doesn’t overwhelm all other moving parts has been the fantasy that women have been chasing for decades through rom coms. If the popularity of the action genre suggests that for generations, men have dreamt of being strong, for women, the persistent fantasy is belonging in the real world instead of being pigeon-holed by it. That’s the real turn-on.