Feels Like Ishq, an anthology of six half-hour films, is a bit like this. Dealing with romantic love among millenials and even Gen Z, it is packed with the easy charm of youth - and largely upper-middle class - but that can also feel like its downside.
The opening film, Save The Da(y)te, written by Monisha Thyagarajan and directed by Ruchir Arun, is an embodiment of this sentiment. The film examines love and marriage, from the points of view of a dreamy, spunky - and let's not miss, wealthy - bridesmaid and BFF (Radhika Madan) and a wedding planner (Amol Parashar), who are on the lookout for a runaway bride. Do they offer new insights or big answers? Not really, you could say it is pleasant enough with sweet one-liners and identifiable moments.
Quaranteen Crush is set in the early days of the lockdown and is a teen romance. Maybe it is a cliche, but director Tahira Kashyap Khurrana and writer Gazal Dhaliwal have put the story in a Punjabi household, which seems the perfect setting for the hilarity this short offers. And the cleverest joke has to be the job of the smitten young boy's father. Under the circumstances, he is reduced to online selling of bras, something that women abandoned en masse during the lockdown.
Star Host and the last short Ishq Mastana have some similarities and try to bring some poignancy into the proceedings. The former, written by Saurabh George Swamy and directed by Anand Tiwari, looks at a young girl being forced to break free from a controlling relationship and dealing with 'mental health' issues, while the latter has two very different personalities, rich boy-environmental activist girl, being thrown together. Writer Shubhra Chatterjee and co-writer and director Jaydeep Sarkar Ishq Mastana tries to go grand with the 'politics' of mystic poet Kabir thrown in. This works to hold the movie together in a sweet way, but again, it is not really an eye-opener.
Neeraj Madhav and Zayn Marie Khan come together for Interview, a story about a high-aiming girl and a Malayali who is trying to find his ground in the job market in Mumbai. Aarti Rawal's script directed by Sachin Kundalkar probably goes against the grain of the anthology, being as much a touching story of hope and aspiration, woven in with the beginnings of a love story. And for this, it probably will appeal better to a more mature audience.
And proving that love of all kinds find space and opportunity today is scriptwriter Sulagna Chatterjee's She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not, directed by Danish Aslam. The story is told within the advertising world and perhaps offers one of the most relaxed views of a same-sex relationship that we have seen on our screen.
Feels Like Ishq definitely feels like it is made for a more youthful audience, though it tries within its limited space to also look at current issues, from environmental concerns and veganism, to mental issues and sexuality.
