Many have prophesied the death of the rom-com, a time when consumers stop watching and wishing for formulaic love. The obituaries keep coming, but the Hollywood rom-com is resilient. It returns time and time again.
Love Again is its latest offering. It stars Priyanka Chopra as Mira Ray, a children’s book writer enveloped by grief following the death of her boyfriend two years ago, and Scottish actor Sam Heughan as Rob Burns, a cynical and unlucky in love music journalist — until he starts receiving Mira’s texts to her dead boyfriend. And Celine Dion enters his life.
Celine Dion is one of the film’s producers and plays herself in Love Again. Dion has crossed over: she’s attained a level of fame where she’s less personality and more persona. The events of the film draw life from this — its protagonists are watched over by a fairy-godmotherly Dion who is embarking on a tour of the United States after over a decade.
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Meeting halfway
Finding a second lease on life after the death of a partner makes for a reasonably enjoyable premise. The formula tends to fuse together past and present, deriving material from memories. Love Again mixes up things slightly, there are no weepy montages of Mira and John, her dead ex — which the film benefits from. Instead, it focuses equally on Mira and Rob as separate entities, alternating between both of their lives.
When their paths finally converge, Love Again is at its halfway point, and one realises that the film is not about Mira coming to terms with or overcoming grief, but finding love from within it swathe.
The issue is that they meet too late into the film, and the wait feels gratuitous. The film is also the first time Chopra and her husband Nick Jonas share screen space. Chopra’s character does go on a textbook-awful date with Jonas, a gym bro with half a brain cell. These are detractions from the plot, and while Love Again doesn’t claim to be anything other than what it is, it still feels gimmicky.
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Bollywood overtones
The moment when the two protagonists finally meet has distinct Bollywood overtones; this is not one of Hollywood’s serendipitous meet-cutes. The location is the opera, the duo is dressed up. There are long looks and close-ups. Everything is dark except their faces — bathed in light.
It seems like Chopra couldn’t help but be a heroine, even when her character’s world is literal and figurative oceans away.
When she started a Hollywood career as Alex Parrish in Quantico, there wasn’t a sliver of Indianness visible in her characterisation. This has shifted slightly. Her name in Love Again — Mira Ray — itself evokes the globalised, diaspora Indian, whose origins are supposed to be ambiguous. This now forms the thrust of Chopra’s identity as a Hollywood star, accessible to people from all cultures, but especially the diaspora.
In the opening scene of the film, Chopra is handed a shawl by her mother as she moves back to New York to restart her life. This is supposed to be some kind of cultural marker, one of the only.
This ambivalence is what the rom-com is known for, and celebrates. Careers are decorative — a music journalist and a children’s book writer live in large apartments in famously expensive New York City. You can get an unsolicited phone call from Celine Dion. The world hinges on chance, on accidents; all of which ultimately align.
It’s easy to pick apart Love Again. There isn’t much to take home from the writing, there are definite plot holes — and Chopra and Heughan don’t have much chemistry either. It isn’t a film that has performed well in the US. But there is something to be said about Love Again — it owes a lot to a genre that is unabashedly itself and those who enjoy it.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)