Love Storiyaan review: Real life happily ever after's that reignite your faith in romance!

Love Storiyaan is a six-part docu-series that retells different shades of real-life tales of romance where people fought through everything to be with each other. 

Watching romance onscreen and reading about it in fiction differs from experiencing it IRL. Because it's easier and less scary to witness love in someone else's life than to feel every moment of it in yours, maybe that's why we all love to escape with rom-coms where an impossible love story, in just a matter of two to three hours, reaches a happily ever after, which might take a lifetime to happen IRL. But Love Storiyaan tries to prove otherwise! It attempts to retell the impossible - real-life love stories with Bollywood romantic themes. 

The six couple stories come from the India Love Project, an Instagram handle that showcases a story of love where courage, inclusivity, and diversity are celebrated. These stories have everything that you expect from a good romantic fictional tale - a whole lot of pyaar, takrar, balidaan, family, emotions, drama, a lot of impossibilities and a happily ever after or something of that sort.

We get stories of 'from hate to love' when a Marxist small-time writer falls for the popular Punjabi blogger he had been trolling or two rival radio jockeys are fated together by their visually impaired ardent fan. We get stories of 'love at first sight' against the backdrop of wars and conflicts where a rich, 'prince charming' Hindu boy falls for a nerdy Muslim girl in Bangladesh, an Afghani Bollywood fanatic falls for a Rekha-lookalike Indian girl in Russia, or a Brahmin IITian turned activist falls for a Dalit activist during a rally and a story of 'made for each other' when a trans man falls for a trans woman when she helps him in his transformation journey. 

Also Read: From swiping to soulmates: Kho Gaye Hum Kahan was the mirror of modern romance!

An Unsuitable Girl, Love on Air, Homecoming, Raah Sangharsh Ki, Faasley, and Love Beyond Labels are all films that deal with the prejudice of the world and fight against all odds. Each film talks about different kinds of marriages, whether they're inter-caste (Brahmin-Dalit), inter-faith (Hindu-Muslim, Hindu-Christian), inter-sex (trans-man-woman), or across countries (Afghan-Indian), and comes to only one conclusion - when you are in love, you only look at one thing and that is the human being. 

But while they all deal with demons outside in the world, they also deal with demons deep within. 'Divorced with kids' is a huge tag to live with but when your kids are not okay with you remarrying or the divorce has left you traumatized with alcohol addiction and commitment issues, it's hard to trust in love again. It's one thing to fight the world for your love but it's hard fighting your own parents and family; it results in leaving home for good which is never easy because when someone parts from their home no matter the reason, they are torn apart. Fighting for your identity seems even harder because how do you explain to your family that you don't feel comfortable in your own body?

I loved the breakthrough moments where the camera was left rolling like a fly on the wall, just there to observe. It's the time when the directors broke the fourth wall and interacted with the subject, asking questions for fun banter or discomfort, reigning some naturalness. Where when a couple discusses who is dominating as a person, it leads to a laughable moment or when the visually impaired woman hears the dogs barking and knows someone is at the door, when a wife corrects her husband, bringing out what her husband was hiding, or when a couple broke down while opening up about their darkest secrets or ended up discussing their wishlist for the future and so much more. This is when it didn't feel like an interview but cinema telling a story. 

Promos at the start of the episodes or reenacting the tale being told felt unnecessary and distracting. They drove you away from emotions rather than drawing you in. The anthology is a bit rainbow-colored in its approach to storytelling. Nevertheless all these stories have a human aspect that makes you believe that, after all, love that fights against all odds to be with each other, that we only see onscreen, is possible in real life too. Though, of course, these half-an-hour episodes are not fully justifiable to the decades of emotions and struggles that these couple have lived through but they still work as an ode to their romantic ballad. 

This dressing up of real-life love stories as Bollywood romantic dramas makes Love Storiyaan, yes, that much debated hinglish word from Brahmāstra, a hopeful delight where you start believing that SRK's Rahul could be possible because you see a real-life Rahul going the distance for his love. And despite all its faults, I am all for this anthology! 

Love Storiyaan is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video!

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