Wild Card: Where Have All the Rom-Coms Gone?

The universe is full of unexplained mysteries and while the alleged success of Netflix India’s romantic comedy Plan A/ Plan B may not be the most important one, it is definitely a contender for the most mystifying. At the time of writing, Plan A/ Plan B was ranked number one among the most-watched movies on Netflix in India. This is despite the mind-numbingly dull writing, which offers us ‘jokes’ like a woman who calls herself Pussy (her name is actually Pushpa), and the fact it’s a romantic comedy in which the lead pair can’t bring themselves to do an on-screen kiss. Instead, they mime kissing, as though they’re teenagers in a school play from the Nineties. This is the same platform that has the 365 Days series (those movies also on the most-watched list for Netflix India in their time). How’s that for range?

The problem with Plan A/ Plan B isn’t the lip-less lip-lock, though you’ve got to wonder why either Riteish Deshmukh or Tamannah Bhatia signed up for a romantic comedy with kissing scenes if they’re this prudish. In a rom-com, the kiss is only the final flourish. Before that, the film must establish rapport and chemistry between the leads — usually achieved through snappy repartée and some smouldering gazes — and to do that, you’ve got to have characters with whom the audience will fall in love. Which in turn means that the storyteller has to be a little in love with their subject. In Plan A/ Plan B, it’s evident that the only thing writer Rajat Arora and director Shashank Ghosh feel for their characters and story is contempt. On paper, an uptight divorce lawyer falling in love with a carefree wedding planner is a classic plot of opposites attract, but Plan A/ Plan B imagines the stupidest versions of these characters. Then it places them in situations that make you wonder whether anyone associated with this film has any real-life experience with romance or dating.

This disdain for the rom-com is particularly curious in the Indian context because our mainstream cinema has almost always relied upon a romantic track to keep an audience’s attention. Even a film like Liger (2022), which is teeming with masculine bluster, is anchored by a love story despite the storytelling choices made by director Puri Jagannadh. Although romances have been categorised as feminine, they often showcase machismo as much as the next action hero. After all, the trope of the big, strong hero saving the day (and the heroine) has its root in classical romances. The genre has also evolved to become one of those few elements in popular culture that places women and their desires front and centre, which makes all the difference. Take, for example Lyssa Kay Adams’s The Bromance Book Club, which is about a group of bros who have a secret club in which they read romances and stars a baseball player named Gavin Scott (and his wife, Thea). It turns out Gavin has a lot in common with Liger. They’re both professional athletes. Both men have a tendency to punch people 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 Vijay Deverakonda, playing the titular character, opens his mouth and struggles to complete a word. Meanwhile, in a hypocritical twist, the film also uses others laughing at the stutter 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 either Liger or Plan A/ Plan B.

In the recent past, everyone had written off the rom-com and it’s easy to see why when films as bad as Plan A/ Plan B are brought out as examples of the genre. However, the perception of rom-coms being silly isn’t just about the cinematic standards. We’re frequently told audiences prefer action movies and that rom-coms don’t have currency because they’re 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 most 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 a man, professional success, a gender-agnostic workplace, being seen as beautiful or all of the above. 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 Plan A/ Plan B, Love in the Villa and The Next 356 Days (all available on Netflix). Plan A/ Plan B is so disinterested in its plot that it doesn’t bother to figure out if the heroine is a relationship counsellor or a wedding planner. We see her doing both jobs (badly) while being told to imagine Deshmukh (in a suit) as Christian Grey’s desi and vanilla first cousin. Suspension of disbelief is all well and good, but for Plan A/ Plan B to be a credible fantasy, you need a lobotomy.

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 found global popularity long before Squid Game. Business Proposal, which finished airing on Netflix 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, the mediocre script of Business Proposal is an exception. 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 also been audience favourites because they offer data-based evidence that intelligent love stories do 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 in these stories, 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 out loud 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.