‘Awkward and not toxic’: Farhan Akhtar and team take us behind their latest coming-of-age movie, Eternally Confused and Eager for Love

The best love stories on film are usually self-aware, sometimes even radically so — whether it is Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy or the threadbare romantic dramas of François Truffaut and Raj Kapoor. Netflix’s new romantic dramedy, Eternally Confused and Eager for Love, helmed by writer-director Rahul Nair, hopes to achieve a similar status. The story is of the many travails of 24-year-old Ray, portrayed by Vihaan Samat, as he keeps messing up, learning, unlearning and messing up again.

The “state of being eternally confused” is something that Farhan Akhtar — one of the backers of the series, along with sister Zoya Akhtar and director Reema Kagti — says he can relate to “at a time in my life”. He had explored it in Saif Ali Khan’s character in his 2001 directorial debut, Dil Chahta Hai. “Saif’s character [Sameer] was also a guy who wants a lot of things, but is constantly doubting what he truly wants, whether he is making the right decisions… [grappling with] insecurities of whether he will be truly accepted. But they are part of growing pains, I guess,” he adds.

Extrapolating from the subject, Nair adds that he also wanted to showcase the urban dating scene in Mumbai, which hasn’t been explored enough. We need our own equivalent of the American sitcoms that dramatise the clumsiness of the dating world, he says. “Ray is not necessarily the most confident person and I wanted to figure out how that was. Also, people are a lot more awkward than they make out to be, except the ones sitting on this stage,” Nair jokes, referring to Farhan, Zoya, and Kagti who are part of the conversation, along with actor Jim Sarbh.

No mind games here

The idea of an awkward, introverted man figuring out the labyrinthine lanes of dating isn’t new. But Nair has tried to inject some humour and freshness to it by laying bare what goes on in the protagonist’s mind. He’s given the constant, nagging voice in Ray’s head its own character — Wiz, voiced by Sarbh. “I’ve met people who are simultaneously arrogant and insecure at the same time; it’s bizarre,” Sarbh muses, as I wonder if he found resonance with his own inner chaos in the character of Wiz. Very much so, he says. “[Wiz represents] that chaos inside all of us — the inappropriate joke that you don’t say, or the inappropriate joke that you do say and the inner voice that keeps telling you ‘don’t do it, don’t do it’.”

Incidentally, the ‘relationship’ between Ray and Wiz is Zoya’s favourite bit, one that she describes as a love story on its own. “I love coming-of-age stories and I keep ‘coming of age’ in everything I do,” she laughs. “The show is just an extension of the same thought: how does that inner dialogue work and how do you become your own friend? I reacted to that relationship the most.”

She recalls a scene where Ray’s character gets cold feet when he realises that his date is ‘fat’, only to be rebuked by Wiz about how it is ironic of him to be so superficial when he has struggled with self-esteem issues all his life. “So, Rahul [Nair] did a good job of broadcasting our inner insecurities and then also pulling it back on the ground.”

A different love language

For a show that gives us a ringside view into the mind of an introvert, the female characters are refreshingly not cardboard figures. Kagti says that Nair has “managed to write the women really well”, a pleasant departure from narratives orientated to, and in service of, the male gaze. “Usually women characters in movies and shows lose their identity and start doing whatever the male character needs them to do,” she says. “It’s not consistent [to the female experience].”

In Kagti and Zoya’s Amazon Prime Video series Made in Heaven, we’re shown a range of women characters — flawed, fiercely ambitious and yet individualistic. Similarly, Alankrita Shrivastava’s Netflix series Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare held nothing back in advocating the case that women’s desires can indeed be front and centre in popular cinema.

Kagti’s own debut film, the 2007 hit Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd., also had subplots that explored the many faces of love, across age groups and sexualities, and the far from ideal conclusions many love stories usually have to grapple with. “This kind of space in films doesn’t exist enough and when it does, it’s usually toxic. The idea that you can be a confident and even a good looking person, and still have a lot of baggage is a reality that this show beautifully presents,” she concludes.

Eternally Confused and Eager for Love streams on Netflix from March 18.