The title of the film whimsically fuses two words from two languages – love and siyappa – to convey what it is about – a wild and wacky scenario in which unbridled, unending chaos caused by secret online entanglements sends a steady romantic liaison between two Delhi youngsters into a maddening tailspin. Loveyapa is uneven but fun, frothy but anything but pointless. It isn’t all empty talk and texting.
It isn’t just words that crash into each other in Loveyapa. Two worlds and impulses – virtual and real, East and West Delhi, and male proclivities and female instincts – are posited against each other in the film. The busy crisscrossing creates its share of problems for the characters as well as the film’s makers. Eventually, for the latter, it does not go out of hand.
The efficacy of the quirky exercise rests on the key onscreen performances – leads Junaid Khan and Khushi Kapoor are fully clued in, as are Ashutosh Rana, Grusha Kapoor, Kiku Sharda and Tanvika Parlikar in the principal supporting roles, and the tempering of the comic energy that is built into the script.
On both counts, Loveyapa, directed by Advait Chandan (Secret Superstar, Laal Singh Chaddha), hits the right notes for the most part. Adapted from the 2022 Tamil hit Love Today – its writer, director and star Pradeep Ranganathan is duly credited for the screenplay – this zany Zoomer rom-com is a whirligig that takes some doing to get a hang of. It is dizzying in pace and rhythm. It, however, has spaces where light enters and illuminates the madcap goings-on.
The relentless flow of visuals, verbiage and emojis denoting love, hugs, passion and whole array of other feelings of endearment is a touch befuddling to begin with, but once the patterns that editor Antara Lahiri creates settle into an intelligible, communicative beat, Loveyapa is a breezy, fairly enjoyable affair replete with quirky situations that add up to more than what they appear to be on the surface.
Loveyapa makes no great demands on our grey cells but it isn’t, at the same time, the kind of Hindi film that lets you watch it without having to bank upon your brain. As it hurtles along, the film conveys a bunch of pertinent notions about daunting impediments to finding, nurturing and holding on to love and trust in a hyperconnected, fast-moving world where ‘truth’ is a heartless, shape-shifting, frequently judgement-clouding monster.
Troubles mount quickly for IT professional Gaurav “Gucci” Sachdeva (Junaid Khan) and his steady girlfriend Baani Sharma (Khushi Kapoor) when the latter’s hyper-nosey, super-orthodox, sitar-strumming lawyer-dad (Ashutosh Rana) orders them to exchange their mobile phones for 24 hours before making up their minds to marry each other.
They are madly in love. That is how it seems at the outset. Baani is a West Delhi girl raised by a disciplinarian dad. Gucci is from across the Yamuna. But there is much more than just a river separating the two. Baani’s dad calls the shots. He never so much as pay any heed to the opinion of others.
When Gucci faces the exasperatingly unyielding man for the first time, he is a bundle of nerves. The awkward encounter ends in the phone-exchange proposal that turns Baani and Gucci’s worlds upside down.
In an era in which our lives play out in real time on social media, messages and photo/video trails on Insta, Snap and WhatsApp leave behind traces that are hard to erase, as Baani and Gucci find out the hard way. Secrets begin to tumble out of the mobile phones. Amid the constant digital tattling, their relationship is in danger of being torn to shreds.
Everything that can go wrong goes wrong for Gucci and Baani – they fondly call each other Babboo and Baaniboo – but all the affection flies out the window in double quick time. Their many dalliances and deflections jump out at them from the crypts of information that lie buried in their mobile phones.
Gucci’s phone proves harder to dive into. It seems clean. Baani’s phone isn’t. So, the boyfriend, who lives with his mother (Grusha Kapoor) and elder sister Kiran (Tanvika Parlikar) whose wedding with successful dental surgeon Anupam (Kiku Sharda, stepping into the role that Yogi Babu played with great aplomb in Love Today) is days away, gives Baani hell by subjecting her to humiliating and prying questions about her ex-es and the time that she spent with them.
The same excess comes back to bite Gucci in the second half when it is the turn of his phone to blow the lid off his many secrets, a few of them bordering on the embarrassingly shady. He suddenly finds his past flings and follies being questioned and judged exactly the way he had questioned and judged Baani’s indiscretions.
Can true love thrive in such an environment of distrust and constant snooping? That is what Loveyapa examines via the predicaments the lovers confront.
The bubblegum romance goes completely off the rails as a slew of emotional cross-connections surface and bring the lovers face to face with the selves they have hidden from the world and provoke them to jump to hasty conclusions.
Another significant strand of Loveyapa revolves around Gucci’s sister and her would-be husband. It addresses the theme of fat-shaming, a common abomination in an airbrushed and filtered environment in which looking good, right and desirable are defined from extremely narrow standpoints.
Ashutosh Rana, speaking shudh Hindi (mazaak is uphaas for him as a case in point), contributes more humour to the film than the rigmarole the hero and heroine are caught in. Neither Junaid Khan nor Khushi Kapoor is spectacular – the two roles have their limitations and both actors do well to stay within them – but they prove equal to the task.
Kiku Sharda, usually confined on the idiot box peddling largely broad-strokes comedy for a few laughs, has a substantial role with a range of shades. It dangles between the droll and the solemn. The actor strikes the balance with poise.
Loveyapa will probably not send you into paroxysms of delight, but it is a decent enough film while it lasts.
