Modern Love Season 2: Mediocre collection of stories

Modern Love – Season Two

English (Amazon Prime Video)

Director: John Carney

Cast: Minnie Driver, Kit Harington, Lucy Boynton, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Zoë Chao

Rating: 2.5/5

The thing about love is that it keeps changing its form every now and again. If you think it’s bright and peppy one day, you’ll realize that it has a leaky bottom through which its glorious nutrients are falling off the next.

It’s a mistake to think that all relationships will last a lifetime – and this doesn’t mean the ones that concern romance alone. Even when subtle promises of togetherness are made at the heat of the moment, they may sound egregious later. The second season of Amazon Prime Video’s ‘Modern Love’ taps into this area mostly, but its collection of stories is shockingly mediocre.

While the first season began with a wholesomely upbeat episode in which a doorman helped a young lady make the right choices, the latest eight-episode installment reignites the anthology by focusing on the idea of nostalgia. Surely, on its own, it’s not a bad way to look back on the good old days.

But, the episode, titled ‘On a Serpentine Road, With the Top Down,’ may not work for those who’re looking for a comfort watch. Therefore, the urge to consume the show in one sitting may disappear sooner rather than later. Minnie Driver, who plays a doctor here, is excellent as a woman who aches for the company of her first husband (played by Tom Burke), who’s no longer alive.

Driver pulls you into a world of what-ifs. Obviously, grief isn’t the only subject that’s being mined. There are other sentiments, too, that briefly appear to illustrate her inability to cope with the loss of her first husband and the life she once lived with him.

And there’s certainly something that needs to be said about the objects that remind us of the people who’ve left us. It can be their clothes, the perfumes they wore, or even the cars they drove. We tend to attach our feelings to materials more often than not and refuse to let them go in order to move on. Although this episode manages to leave you with a gentle tear or two, it doesn’t have the magnetic force to suck you into the strange and sublime nature of love.

In the later episodes such as ‘In the Waiting Room of Estranged Spouses’ and ‘How Do You Remember Me?,’ the narrative devices take precedence over the meaty part of the narratives themselves. In the former, a woman and a man come together to extend their shoulders for each other to lean on since their marital lives are intertwined, and, in the latter, an event that has happened in the past keeps jumping between two points of view. This kind of showmanship is definitely cheeky, but it won’t heighten your interest to make you wrap your head around the nitty-gritties of relationships that come with an expiry date.

Perhaps the best of the lot is ‘The Night Girl Finds a Day Boy’ where Zoe (Zoë Chao) and Jordan (Gbenga Akinnagbe) organically fall in love despite the odds that are stacked against them. Zoe can only stay awake during the night hours due to a medical condition, whereas Jordan likes to go to restaurants and parks during the day.

For any couple, this can be tricky to navigate and that’s how it is for them, as well, in the initial days of their dating period. He stays up late to go on midnight dates with her; however, as the weeks wear on, he tries to see the problem for what it is.

It’s amazing as to how Jordan comes around to finding a middle ground so that he can be with the woman of his dreams and that’s exactly what ‘Modern Love’ should have been about – love in all its avatars, albeit in ways that can stir us up.

In ‘Strangers on a (Dublin) Train,’ you almost get a feature-length romantic comedy with the actors reaching for the highest berth of a flirtatious exchange on where else but the train. Paula (Lucy Boynton) and Michael (Kit Harington) have fun conversations while they’re on their way to their respective homes.

They casually chat about everything and nothing at the same time. Their small talk is filled with little desires and fears, but they carry on as though their destinations do not matter. They know that they can give a shot at coupledom, but Michael doesn’t make a note of Paula’s phone number, or any of the details regarding where she lives.

He places a stupid condition in front of her thinking that it’ll make their romantic adventure a lot more exciting. But in a world where we’re mostly connected via text messaging services, is it even possible for us to behave as though we’re at the turn of the twentieth century?

In the days to come, Kit Harington will replace Dev Patel (from season one) as the face of ‘Modern Love’. And one wishes that there were better takeaways from a show such as this.