When a lovey-dovey couple swaps cellphones as a pre-condition for marriage, chaos breaks out in their virtual and real lives. Gaurav and Baani think they know everything there is to know about each other. A game played by Baani’s father Atul exposes the Gen-Z pair’s mutual ignorance, false expectations and inadequate crisis management skills.
Atul (Ashutosh Rana) puts Gaurav (Junaid Khan) and Baani (Khushi Kapoor) through what he calls a trust test. Exchange your personal instruments for 24 hours, access each other’s messages and videos, and see if you still want to be with each other, he tells his daughter and her boyfriend.
If they fail the test, Atul will marry Baani off to someone he has in mind. More than the uncomfortable secrets unearthed by Gaurav and Baani, it is Atul’s breathtakingly casual cruelty towards his own daughter that stands out in Loveyapa.
But Advait Chandan’s Loveyapa isn’t about the patriarch who gleefully behaves like an evil puppeteer, yanking the strings of vulnerable 24 year olds. Apart from the skeletons that are unearthed in the excavation of browsing history, there’s a sub-plot about the nuptials of Gaurav’s sister Kiran (Tanvika Parlikar) and Anupam (Kiku Sharda).
Anupam too is sucked into a phone exchange exercise, which proves just how infectious – and poisonous – Atul’s project is.
To examine Loveyapa is to look back on its source, Pradeep Ranganathan’s Love Today (2022), so closely does the Hindi remake mirror the original Tamil movie. Gags, plot turns, the use of split screens and enactment of text-based chats survive the journey from Tamil to Hindi. The 138-minute Loveyapa’s major contribution is a welcome trimming of Love Today’s bloated 154-minute runtime.
Love Today, which is available on Netflix, worked very well within its context for its freshness, rat-a-tat dialogue and sly take on the honesty versus privacy debate. Ranganathan’s cautionary tale had an absurdist quality, which made its conservatism and questionable handling of its heroine’s travails palatable.
The Hindi version also has its share of truth bombs, a few of them supplied by Gaurav’s mother (Grusha Kapoor). There are several laugh-out-loud moments as Gaurav and Baani scramble to make sense of the unbidden avalanche of information about previous relationships and personal traits.
What Loveyapa lacks is the kind of lived-in, believable performances needed to carry off the emotional costs of forced confessions. While the leads fit their roles in terms of age, they are sometimes hard-pressed to enact the ensuing mayhem. Khushi Kapoor is better placed than Junaid Khan to portray a young soul’s bruising encounter with adulthood.
The darker aspects of the father’s mean-spirited ploy – a problem in Love Today that carries over to Loveyapa – go unchallenged. What does it say about Atul that he blandly listens to Gaurav describing Baani as a “player”, or that he barely reacts to a tragic consequence of his meddling? And when did young people get so submissive and become so terrified of grown-ups?
For all the yapping, there is a great silence over Atul, played with adequate smugness by Ashutosh Rana. The suspicion that the couple is better off without their parents or even without each other lingers in the remake, which faithfully but also mechanically follows a gimmicky premise all the way through.
