India makes films about love like Musafir Cafe and Love.
So why does it struggle to make romantic comedies that see the world through a
woman's eyes?
I think it is not fair that a woman can watch You've Got Mail for the
fifteenth time and still get butterflies when Meg Ryan walks into that
bookshop, but Bollywood, an industry that has practically built its empire on
people falling in love, has so few films that make women feel this way. You can
come up with the old examples of DDLJ and Dil Toh Pagal Hai and Hum Tum but how
many shows or movies in the past 5 years have made us go giddy? I had this
thought while watching The Love Hypothesis that there is a rom-com shaped void
in our hearts that no one knows how to fill.
As a millennial on bad days and during holiday season, I turn to Nora
Ephron, because the lady knew the secret. Romance wasn't just about the grand
gesture, the airport chase or a man realising that he couldn't live without the
woman he'd spent two hours taking for granted. It was also about the woman. As
my friends and I discuss often, romance and rom-com is the only genre where
women have agency, women are thriving and good things are happening to
them.
In this genre - the spotlight is on what she wants, what
she fears, the terrible decisions she makes, the conversations she replayed in
her head and the possibility that the man she was falling for might, actually,
be an idiot.
In When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, Ephron
made neuroses sexy, conversation an aphrodisiac and ordinary life something
worth dressing up for. Her women had careers, apartments, opinions and very
specific ideas about food. They could be romantic without being silly,
ambitious without being cold and lonely without being tragic. They didn't need
to be extraordinary women doing extraordinary things. They just needed to be
interesting.
And Bollywood? Bollywood has a love affair with love. It just isn't always
interested in the woman experiencing it. If you have watched Romantics - you
know how obsessed our movies and filmmakers have been with the idea of people
falling in love.
And if I am being fair, Hindi cinema has given us wonderful female
characters and romantic films that have endured for generations. But look at
the space available to women in today's mainstream storytelling. The female-led
film carries the weight of a social issue, a feminist statement or an
inspirational journey. The romantic comedy, meanwhile, is built around a male
protagonist's pursuit, with the woman serving as his motivation, his reward or
the plot twist that gets him to grow up.
Where is the film about a woman who has a perfectly good job, a complicated
relationship with her mother, a questionable taste in men and absolutely no
idea what she is doing with her life? Where is the 38-year-old who wants to
fall in love but doesn't want to be told that her biological clock is ticking?
Where is the woman who can be selfish, funny, sexually confident, insecure and
spectacularly wrong about a man without the screenplay treating her as either a
cautionary tale or a role model?
This is where the female gaze is crucial. It isn't simply about putting a
woman behind the camera or making the male lead look good in a linen shirt. It
is about whose feelings get the close-up - whose desire drives the plot, who
gets to be complicated.
Ephron's women weren't always right. They were allowed to be a glorious
mess. The films didn't punish them for wanting romance and being miserable post
break ups, nor did they suggest that finding a man was the ultimate prize. Love
was part of the adventure, not the entire itinerary of the vacation called
life.
The opportunity for Indian cinema is enormous. Our dating lives come with
parental surveillance, matrimonial apps, class anxieties, WhatsApp overthinking
and the very Indian art of pretending not to care while caring deeply. There is
enough material here for a dozen brilliant romantic comedies. We have the
locations, the actors and an audience that continues to show up for a good love
story. What we seem to lack is the conviction that a woman's everyday emotional
life can hold a film together without a murder, a courtroom or a social evil
thrown in for good measure.
Nobody is asking Bollywood to transplant Manhattan to Mumbai or turn every
heroine into Meg Ryan. We need our own version of that magic - a
woman talking too much, falling for the wrong people, changing their minds
and figuring themselves out somewhere between work, friendship and a terrible
date. Make space for these stories!
Because the great thing about a Nora Ephron film was never that everything
worked out perfectly. It was that, for two hours, the mess of being alive and
in love felt worth watching. It felt cinematic and glorious! For an
industry that has spent decades selling us romance, Bollywood could do with
remembering that women aren't merely the reason men fall in love. They have
love stories of their own.
And frankly, we'd quite like to watch them.
BIO: Mohar Basu is a journalist with Mid-Day and author of bestselling books
Shah Rukh Khan : Legend, Icon, Star and Salman Khan : The Sultan of Bollywood.
She writes about cinema, stardom, fan cultures and the impact of cinema and the
movie industry on society.
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