Modern Love Review | Season 2 | Sucharita Tyagi | Prime Video
Hi welcome back channel par. Aaj baat karte
hain Amazon Prime Video ki series, Modern
Love Season 2 ki. If you haven’t watched
Season 1, don’t worry about it kyunki each
episode is a short film unto itself, exploring
1 theme about…modern love.
I know Im coming to this late, but last few
weeks have been zara mentally exhausting,
toh I’ve been taking it slow.
Par kyunki yeh mera channel hai, meri apni
deadline chalaati hoon main.
Amazon prime par Modern love ka season 2,
takreeban 2-2.5 hafte se stream ho raha hai,
and its just as lovely as you’ve heard.
Season 1 ko palat kar dekha jaaye toh star
cast uski comparatively zayada popular thi.
Tina Fey, Dev patel, Oscar winner Anne Hathaway,
Hot preiest Andrew Scott…..kaafi mainstream
faces.
Season 2 mein you’ll recognize Anna Paquin,
Kit Harrington, Tobias Menzies who you most
recently saw as Olivia Coleman ka Prince Charles,
par most of the faces, atleast for an Indian
audience, are new.
Kyunki the star cast of season1 did what it
was supposed to do, pull in an audience unfamiliar
with the Modern Love column in the New York
times, generate our interest and keep us.
Season 2 doesn’t need that extra push I
guess, kyunki proof
The most amazing thing about this series is
its ability to empathize with, represent and
hence validate our bizarre experiences, as
they occur in the big crazy cities we live
in. Knight in shining armor, ya Cinderella
at the ball are stories jinhoine bachpan mein
dimaag kharaab kar diya tha, unhi ke bhinn-bhinn
various iteration we saw in mainstream rom-coms
for DECADES on end, creating unrealistic standards
around romantic relationships, not taking
into account how the evolving world alters
love on molecular levels.
Modern Love season 2 opens with the most emotional
story of the lot, uncharacteristically not
set in New York, or any city. “On a Serpentine
Road, With the Top Down” is the story of a
woman looking to sell her old car, lekin is
having emotional issues with making the actual
sale kyunki it was her late husband’s, and
she just has way too many memories associated
with it. Minnie Driver…..drives….pun intended
this car and the story towards a wholesome
and moving conclusion which doesn’t seem
forced, far-fetched or manipulative, despite
the dead husband angle.
Think about it, when you marry someone and
start a family with them, the life you create
together is full of things. In a loving relationship,
every object, every purchase has a story,
a reason why its part of life. You don’t
have complete control over which one of you
will outlive the other, but giving up on things
you owned together, how does one voluntarily
get rid of them, without feeling the guilt
of moving on? Such a potent emotion, pehle
episode mein hi sabse zyada ro diya mainey.
Next up, Night Girl Find a Day Boy takes your
regular meet-cute at a café in a big city,
and adds a fun little twist to it. The girl
has a condition which keeps her awake at night.
This short explores what it is to build a
relationship with someone with a not-so-obvious
disability, within the constraints of our
modern lives. A unique problem which no film,
book, news item, any popular culture has prepared
us for, how do you create rules in the absence
of a playbook? People are just people after
all, with varying levels of empathy, limited
capability for compassion.
Strangers on a (Dublin) Train stars Kit Harrington
and Lucy Boynton, and it’s the only short
which acknowledges the world-wide pandemic
we’re living through. Set right before the
world went into lock down, this funny little
story is about two people who try to go old
school and chose not to connect via technology,
setting a date and location to meet again
instead, not knowing about the impending lockdown.
The funnest bits here play out in the train
where these two meet, some over-the-top moment
designed to be oh so adorable. Made me think
ki kitni saarey magical, wonderful, incredible
cheezein hoti hain iss ek life mein, and how
now close to 2 years have been stolen from
us. Shuru mein sabka tha, haan this si good,
we need a break. Ab yeh break khatam hi nahi
ho raha hai, and as the last shot of this
film says, kab khatam hoga pata nahi, aur
kitna price pay karna padega kya maaloom.
The dialogue in this fun is particularly funny,
slapstick even, there’s also a Game Of Thrones
reference hello Jon Snow.
The next….A life plan for two followed by
one…is the weakest of the lot. Very regular
high-school romance story, which offers nothing
new. Then there is Am I…Maybe this quiz
will tell me, another high-school story, with
the added layer of the protagonist coming
to terms with her sexuality. Its sweet, tender,
involves Buzzfeed quizzes, asking how much
reliance on social media is too much? How
much access to our actual feeling and being
must we give to algorithms?
The 6th short, In The Waiting Room Of Estranged
Spouses was a really fun exploration of the
gray between the black and white of what makes
relationships fall apart. What level of infidelity
are you willing to forgive. How to kids figure
in the situation? When do you begin to see
other people? These kind of stories aren’t
the ‘never seen before’ variety, but very
rarely dikhaata hai koi itna simply, asaanai
hai, relatable. One sequence int his short
stands out where a war-veteran is striding
along on the sidewalk letting go of his past,
confronting his PTSD and broken relationship,
its quite something to watch.
How Do You Remember Me….takes the Rashomon
technique, of remembering / recalling the
same incident from different point of views,
and applies to a very short-lived, but overall
pleasant relationship between two men. They
spot each other on the street, and flashbacks
begin, ping-ponging between them both. This
short is paced so well, kyunki the duration
seemingly is only the time it takes these
two men to finish the distance between them
on the street, but in those….rougly 2 minutes,
they re-live their entire emotional bond,
perhaps even wondering where it went wrong.
Neither of them is unhappy where they are
in life, but are just wondering if their encounter
with each other was this life or another.
And lastly, there’s ‘A Second Embrace,
With Hearts and Eyes Open’. A divorced couple
re-ignites their romance, only for a serious
illness to come in between. While I liked
how wonderfully sappy and sweet this short
was, I LOVED Sophie Okonedo as the lead, Elizabeth.
Too used to living life as a single mother,
a black woman devoted to her work, she has
a fierce defensiveness about her, which most
might look at as snobbery, bitchiness even,
wondering why she’s so miserable all the
time. Makes you stop and check your inherent
sexism a bit. Would you say the same if it
were a man, heck would you feel this way if
it were a white woman protecting herself,
making herself her own first priority? In
cruel irony, none of these mechanisms come
to her defense, when her body begins to fail
her.
Modern love season 2 is a fun breezy watch
you can spread out over weeks, coming back
to an episode whenever you have time and need
a break. It excels at simple, non-challenging
but satisfying storytelling, a colorful array
of acting performances, a lovely title track
joh kabhi skip nahi karoge, its all curated
to feel like a skit being performed just for
you in your living room. It also excels at
respectful representation, cast members are
black, Asian, gay, awkward, old, divorced….everything
a trope is not.
Watch the series on Amazon Prime Video.
Comments mein bataao, your favorite? If I
had to pick, I’d go for the 1st episode,
the one about the car. You?
Subscribe kar lein channel ko. Badey dino
baad dimaagi funk ke baahar nikli hoon, abhi
har 2-3 din mein kuch-kuch naya-naya aata
rahega, dekhtey raho.
