Eternally Confused and Eager For Love review: Yet another addition to the list of emotionally vacant high-aesthetic shows

Language: English

We know how the homes will look like or how the breakfast table will be laid, on most days. It is this extreme comfort zone, where the story is watchable, the characters super relatable, and nearly nothing is memorable.

Urban Hindi, rather Hinglish, OTT content has been increasingly resembling an Instagram grid in motion. Perfect lighting, lush décor, a well thought-out colour palette, clothes, cocktails, and so on. It is an aesthetic we effortlessly identify with, but also one where we find it hard to differentiate one show from the other.

We know how the homes will look like or how the breakfast table will be laid, on most days. It is this extreme comfort zone, where the story is watchable, the characters super relatable, and nearly nothing is memorable.

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Insert Eternally Confused And Eager For Love, in this universe. It comes from the house of Excel Entertainment and Tiger Baby Films, helmed by Farhan Akhtar, Ritesh Sidhwani, Zoya Akhtar, and Reema Kagti respectively – the names that have become synonymous with what film studies loosely classify as the “class” film. A genre that navigates the upper middle class or the uber rich only, where the primary language of communication is English, swearing is par for the course, and everything from parties to pathos comes in glossy, aspirational packaging.

This eight-part series revolves around Ray [Vihaan Samat], a 24-year-old awkward Bandra boy, who is best described by the title. For someone who seems to be doing well for himself with a stable job, affluent parents, and no parental issues, we do not really get why he is awkward and struggling with social filters, but well that is the premise. It is a world where less than five minutes into the show, the mother asks her son, “Are you gay?” because he does not seem to have a girlfriend or a social life. It used to take longer than that, but hello 2022.

One gets the feeling that the makers took the exact template of Hollywood rom-coms and sitcoms, and did not Indianise it but inserted Indian-looking Americans in it. They enter offices with takeaway coffees, they refer to school as “high-school,” and are either doing shots or brunching. I mean what Indian guy is called Ray? He even has an imaginary friend Wiz, a bobble-head doll [voiced by Jim Sarbh], who is probably the best part of the show. It is like his inner voice, confidant, alter-ego – all rolled into one. This device reminds us of Fleabag’s talking-to-the-audience moments, and even though Sarbh has been given some crackling lines, contextually, it is not nearly as brilliant.

Ray also has one non-imaginary friend, Riya [Dalai], who has known him from school, and hence she is the only one that puts him at ease. Everyone in Ray’s circle seem to be living in and around Bandra, they are all on a dating app called Homerun [what else], they party a lot, they ‘twin’ don’t ‘match’, they think ‘panvati’ is a girl’s name, they mess up, fix things, and mess up again – they are basically busy being 24.

Ray too, in his own awkward, borderline misanthropic fashion, navigates this sticky [pun intended, watch the show] territory of dating, learning, unlearning and never learning. We have seen this boy before, a little in Saif Ali Khan’s Sameer in  _Dil Chahta Hai_ or Ranbir Kapoor’s Sid in  _Wake Up Sid_. But unlike his predecessors, who remain two of the most loved and remembered characters in the urban Bollywood space, Samat’s Ray remains ho-hum. And that is where lies the undoing of Eternally Confused and Eager For Love: it fails to make you root for Ray, the way we did for Sameer and Sid.

He is conflicted and confused, and is given a grand total of two expressions to work with, but director Rahul Nair fails to unpack the complexity of the whys and wherefores of Ray. Much like Sid in Wake Up Sid, who had no interest in finding a future in his father’s shower fittings empire, Ray too will not be a part of his family’s diaper dynasty. But do we care for what Ray does? No. Side note: What is with these urban fathers and their businesses of generating bathroom billions?

Upper class Bollywood is increasingly becoming as analogous as hinterland Bollywood.

Rahul Bose and Suchitra Pillai, who play Ray’s parents in Eternally Confused and Eager For Love, have been the totems of this genre for nearly two decades now. [Can we even imagine Pillai in a non-urban setting?] Of course, they are both actors par excellence who do not need to try too hard to lift a scene. But I feel this genre could have its own multiverse. It is like Rahul Bose ditched Mallika Sherawat in Pyaar Ke Side Effects [2006], and married Suchita Pillai’s ‘Dracula’ to become this odd but stable couple who are now parents to an awkward 24-year-old. And Suchitra Pillai had a past with Saif’s Sameer. This is fun.

While much of Eternally Confused and Eager For Love feels like déjà vu, there is one aspect that does not – the way women are written on the show. For once, they are not products of the male gaze alone, and are hard to put in a box. Ray’s first date Karishma [Malika Kumar] might not be the svelte stereotype dance-floor beauty, but she exudes confidence without coming across as overbearing. And despite “a few extra pounds,” she is not desperate to latch on to the first decent looking bloke that comes her way. Pari [Namrata Sheth], on the other hand, fits the party-girl image, but is more than her heels. Riya too is self-assured, level-headed, and outgoing. Despite her emotional issues, she is a product of a lot else. It is refreshing to see what is being increasingly labelled as “liberated” women, who do not measure themselves in terms of the male gaze, or anybody else’s gaze but their own.

On some level, the show does appear a little self-aware of its Western quotient. No matter how American we get with our brunches and imaginary friends, we still hesitate to say the C-word. Ray, who barely speaks four words in Hindi, cannot go beyond “kya bolte hai usko… umm” while asking for a condom at the counter. Ah well, not all is lost.

One could have called this a ‘coming-of-age’ show, except that no real transformation happens in our boy. But despite all the templates it functions within, the actors do a fine job, although the only one that stands out is the one that we do not see – Jim Sarbh as Wiz. He is sometimes silly, sometimes wise, sometimes utterly useless but always funny. It is hard to think that we do not see him because he is quite the all-encompassing force in this show that does not give you much to remember otherwise.

The writing is crisp, the editing sensible with 20-minute episodes, and Sid Shirodkar’s closing-credit music is super refreshing. Sure, the show is a zeitgeist of the times we live in, but do not go looking for emotional complexities and nuance that are the hallmark of this production house. On the other side of the eight episodes, you will feel like you do after hours of doom-scrolling on Instagram – it keeps you occupied but makes you feel empty.

Eternally Confused and Eager For Love is streaming on Netflix India.

Kusumita Das is a freelance journalist from India currently living in Jerusalem. She writes on cinema, culture and travel, and in her free time tries to string together sentences in Hebrew.

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