Whenever I see a truly original Indian film I feel like doing cartwheels. And if it is original and engaging, like this Tamil film, nothing like it. Love Today is almost entirely devoted to doing a savoury probe into the culture of the smartphone.
The phone is indeed the central character of the devious plot. Director and leading man Pradeep Ranganathan, who wrote the screenplay based on his own short film App(a) Lock, is a man of ideas. Though saturated in schmaltzy sweetness and foreseeable solutions to tangles in the repartee-heavy plot, the screenplay, in spite of its filminess (as in filmy and flimsy), succeeds in tearing out a telling point on how pathologically dependent modern relationships have become on the content of one’s phone.
The film aptly begins at a smartphone factory, where we see phones being churned out. It then moves to a phone outlet, where our unlikely hero Pradeep (played by the writer-director) buys a phone for his girlfriend Ivana (Nikitha), who must now find a way to explain the expensive gift to her father.
From this common middle-class smartphone-related crisis, the narrative constructs a clever, somewhat exaggerated, and mildly dystopian plot about the paranoia that love relationships suffer due to the phone.
You really don’t want to know what’s on your partner’s phone, do you? The film makes a strong case against phone prying. Trust, says the film, is the main thrust in modern relationships. Trust your partner even if he or she gives you ample reason not to. The film says what he or she hides in the phone (mainly interactions with the opposite sex) do not prove the quality of your partner’s devotion.
I am not sure I buy that logic. But yes, one needs to trust unconditionally for any relationship to survive.
There is an elucidative flashback in which the hero repeatedly digs out a seed he had planted during his childhood to see why it is not growing into a tree. The mother, played by Radhika, says, “Let the seed remain buried. Trust in it to grow.”
Motherly gyan comes in very handy in this phoney fable. But why must the matriarch in Tamil-Telugu films almost always be so loud and aggressive towards their sons? Is the aggression an Oedipal issue?
Love Today is not only about Pradeep and Ivana discovering a space beyond the phone screen for their relationship to breathe. It is also about Pradeep’s sister Divya(Raveena Ravi) and her growing dread that her seemingly perfect fiancé Yogi(played by the over-used Yogi Babu) is hiding some awful secrets in his phone.
Admittedly, this smart film about the smartphone overstates its case on several occasions. The film is way too loud and insistent, drawing out its plot justifications with whoops of see-we-told-you self-congratulations.
However, the message, despite being heavily underlined, does succeed in coming through.
While Pradeep Ranganathan scores significant points as a storyteller, I am not sure he fits the bill as the leading man. Pradeep is notably lacking in charm or the ability to hold the camera in dramatic places. Some of the excessive emotive energy, like those times when Pradeep taunts and heckles his girl after another discovery on her phone, is written into the plot. Pradeep is just playing along.
The real hero of this phone-and-games drama is the talented Sathyaraj. Playing the heroine’s father, he not-so-casually suggests that his daughter swap her phone with her boyfriend for one day. It is a master plan designed to open up secrets that are best left buried.
Love Today has its blind spots. It is way too flighty and flirtatious in tone; some of the drama between the hero and his mother and between the hero and his friends is too contrived to be convincing. And yet, as a comment on how far and deep the cellphone has taken over our lives, Love Today is bang-on.
