The other day, since I am fairly scholarly about the viewing habits of young adults and purely out of sociological curiosity, I watched what is being called a mini cultural pop phenomenon – a Netflix original film called The Kissing Booth. A high school romance about a young teenager, Elle who has never been kissed till she ends up in a relationship with the school’s resident hottie, Flynn. Only issue – she can’t let anyone know especially her bestie, who is Flynn’s younger brother, Lee. The thing is Elle and Lee have a ‘bro code’ and one of the rules is that the ‘bro’ is off limits (the ‘bro code’ is quite literal).
After a rather giddy two hours, I thought to myself – let this be my deep, dark secret especially after I checked for reviews and found that the average critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes was at 17%. Most of the reviews were downright dismissive – ‘amateur’ was the nicest thing anyone had said about a film that I thought was unpretentious and cute. I then spent a couple of days burdened with my dodgy cinematic taste, and as penance tried very hard to like the arthouse horror film, Hereditary. It didn’t work – bogged down by my guilty secret, I decided to take the route of self-deprecation. I put out a couple of defiant social media updates on my terrible taste in films citing The Kissing Booth as a prime example. And unwittingly found my redemption – everyone I knew who had watched the film had liked it. I investigated further – The Kissing Booth is one of the biggest success stories on Netflix. It was at a high of No 4 on IMDB and is currently at No 9.
Emboldened by these facts, I asked my 14-year-old niece if she had watched this film. She giggled, “I love that film. I watch bits of it every day”. She added approvingly, “You are the only normal old person I know”. That also might be because she doesn’t know Uday Chopra, who tweeted this a fortnight back.
Before we go further, a quick word on #MeetCute.
And Uday Chopra is right – we don’t make enough rom-coms and we definitely don’t have enough #MeetCute moments. Not in Hollywood and definitely not in Bollywood. And it might be because as a friend told me dourly, ‘they are just not woke enough’. Being woke means you don’t have guilty pleasures. And a good old fashioned rom-com is a guilty pleasure – it is comfort food for the soul.
The Kissing Booth, the truth be told is not even a particularly good rom-com. But it gets many things right – a great looking lead pair with tons of chemistry and it takes its time to set up the process of falling in love. Read: Lots of melt in the knee moments. A love story works when it co-opts the audience into that process – making you invest in the happily ever after. I don’t remember the last love story in Hindi cinema or Hollywood in recent times that did that with any degree of success. I don’t remember them even trying as the rom-com gets relegated to becoming a forgotten genre. Banter, falling in love, falling out of love and the final airport dash to the happily-ever-after is far too passé. But then again – is it? The evidence suggests that there is still a huge audience for the rom-com. Which is why something as formulaic and templated and yet comforting as The Kissing Booth has been lapped up to the degree it has. It doesn’t matter if you are a young adult, or a millennial or just an ‘old person’ – nobody can resist the simple pleasures of watching people fall in love in a cute, familiar fashion.
Right now, in Bollywood only Sonam Kapoor is trying with films like Khoobsurat and The Zoya Factor. There is space for a lot more.
That however does not mean Uday Chopra should make a sequel to Pyar Impossible. There is no space for that.
(Naomi Datta is a young adult in her head and follows the lead pair of The Kissing Booth on Instagram for her daily dose of cuteness. She tweets at nowme_datta.)
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