Love Storiyaan Review: Truth is more beautiful than fiction

Truth is stranger than fiction. Sach kadva hota hai (truth is bitter). The sayings go. Love Storiyaan on Prime Video comes as a breath of fresh air in the saturated plethora of content available on streaming platforms. There’s a dearth of love stories or rom-coms, a genre that thrived in Hindi cinema till the first decade of the 2000s. Some makers have tried hard to breathe some life into the genre but the commerce of the business is difficult to keep up with. Plus, it’s fiction.

So, seeing six real-life stories documented in roughly half an hour episode each was refreshing. Every episode chronicles the hardships of a couple coming from different walks of life. Each couple has overcome social obstacles to get married. Whether it is religion, caste, remarriage, geo-politics, or gender identity.

Out of the six, the most enjoyable love story is that by Shazia Iqbal. Sunit and Farida meet as college students in Bangladesh. Theirs is an interfaith union so the obstacles are a given in post 1971-war Bangladesh. They moved to Kolkata in 1976 in search of a better life with each other. The love that they have for each other even in their old age is what great love stories are made of.

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Hardik Mehta’s episode tells the story of Aekta, a divorcee who hails from a Punjabi family and Ullekh, a man from Kerala. Theirs is a corporate romance and that blooms over banters on blogging sites.

Archana Phadke’s episode tells the story of Dhanya, a woman from Kerala who meets Homayoun, an Afghan in Russia. These two brave hearts cross countries for their love. Can you even imagine going to a war-torn Afghanistan during a Taliban regimen and post-9/11 attacks? Dhanya does that for Homayoun. And later Homayoun leaves his country to be with his wife and settle down in Kerala.

Akshay Indikar’s episode has Rahul, a Brahmin falling for Subhadra, a Dalit, at first sight at an activists’ march in central India. Indikar, who made an almost docu-like feature film Trijya (worth checking out), has the couple talking to the camera with little dramatic recreations.

Vivek Soni’s episode tells the story of two radio jockeys who found love in each other. This episode looked a bit more performed than documented, maybe because both Nick and Rajani are radio jockeys. So, they are flamboyant.

Colin Dcunha’s episode tells the story of a transwoman Tista and a transman Dipan whose battles started with their own gender identity.

The common thing in all the stories is that the women are frank, which is great to see. All these brave men and women lived lives filled with so much conflict, hardships, laughter, and above all love, that even a fiction screenwriter would struggle to write.

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Young love in old times has an unmatchable charm. As millennials and Gen Zs, we could only hope to have that charm in our companionship which is often thwarted by ambitions, ideologies, and gender roles. In today’s times, when gender has become such a sensitive topic that men and women are reducing themselves to their gender and identities, it was so endearing to see these love birds, rather brave hearts, taking life in their strides holding each other’s hands than trying to match up to each other’s shoulders.

As for the filmmaking aspect, making a docu-series like Love Storiyaan is a brave choice that Dharmatic Entertainment and its creative head honcho Somen Mishra have made. It’s a brave decision by Prime Video too to give this a platform. But with these brave choices have also come creative decisions to make documentary style storytelling more accessible and palatable for a wider Indian audience. For example, the use of Hindi and English instead of the native languages of the subjects when they speak and the dramatic recreations of certain parts of the stories. Overall, Love Storiyaan is a welcome change in the content. Worth checking out.