Love Storiyaan trailer: Karan Johar’s unscripted series celebrates love in all forms
The trailer of Karan Johar’s Love Storiyaan released on Thursday and here’s what it’s all about. The unscripted series will be released on Prime Video on Feb. 14.
The trailer for the upcoming Prime Video India original series Love Storiyaan released on Thursday. Featuring six heart-warming love stories about overcoming adversity against all odds, the trailer leaves the romantics with a lot to unpack. The series will stream on the OTT platform on Valentine’s Day (February 14).
The trailer
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At the beginning of the trailer, Karan introduces the stories to us, stating, “Love, my darlings, is more than just a script; it’s the heartbeat of life.” Join me as we explore the meaning of real love through the lens of genuine stories.” We soon introduce six love stories that span various themes such as age, divorce, sexuality, gender, caste, and even country. “What’s a good love story without conflict, right,” exclaims someone, while another believes love is nothing but understanding your partner.
Sharing the trailer, Karan wrote on Instagram, “When there’s love, nothing else matters! And what’s better than a real-life story as a reminder for the same? And what’s best? 6 real life love stories that remind you about the magic and power of love Storiyaan!”
About Love Storiyaan
Dharmatic Entertainment produced the series, conceptualized by Somen Mishra, with Karan Johar, Apoorva Mehta, and Somen serving as executive producers. The stories are those featured on the India Love Project, a social media initiative by former journalists Priya Ramani, Samar Halarnkar and Niloufer Venkatraman. Akshay Indikar, who has helmed Raah Sangharsh Ki, Archana Phadke, who has directed Faasley, Collin D’Cunha of Love Beyond Labels, Hardik Mehta of A Unsuitable Girl, and Vivek Soni of Love On Air have served as the directors.
Karan about the project
“Love Storiyaan, for us, is more than just a faithful retelling of real-life love stories. The series looks at love in all its forms, painting a beautiful picture of connections that go beyond the ordinary,” Karan told PTI. “These are stories of real people, from different backgrounds, who faced colossal roadblocks in their journey of finding true love and shown tenacity and persevered by powering through the barriers of culture, faith, gender or even war,” he added. This is his first foray into bringing real stories to audiences.
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Aarya – Antim Vaar review: Sushmita Sen rises to the occasion in a rousing finale to a deeply unsettling conclusion
Aarya – Antim Vaar review: Sushmita Sen unleashes her inner Durga in the final blow of Ram Madhvani’s endlessly sumptuous family crime drama.
Aarya – Antim Vaar review: Creator Ram Madhvani revealed right in the opening shot of the Season 3 trailer of his family crime drama Aarya that Sushmita Sen’s titular character gets shot. The rest of the season unfolds in flashbacks, but the investigation isn’t so much about why she gets shot, how she gets there, whether she survives, or who pulls the trigger. While all these questions and discoveries leave great scope for thrill, it’s a larger, overarching question that Ram is most interested in: Does Aarya get closure?
Closing all loops
The family crime drama is a genre that keeps giving. From Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic Godfather trilogy to Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s recent Bollywood blockbuster Animal, there’s so much to swallow, chew, wash down, and digest. From the relentless thrills of its screenplay to the underlying commentary about how a generation’s choices inform the next one’s and how the kids end up becoming exactly what they despised in their birth givers – a family crime drama makes for an endlessly sumptuous feast.
Aarya gets all the beats of this genre right only because Ram and his co-directors Kapil Sharma and Shraddha Pasi Jairath are able to consistently strike the perfect balance of thrill and drama. Unlike the recent Prime Video India Original show Indian Police Force, viewers can’t discern which scenes Rohit Shetty directed and which ones his lesser co-director Sushwant Prakash helmed. The thread running through all seasons of Aarya is woven with its ideology – and that’s what gives the show its own riveting personality.
This doesn’t imply that Aarya remains static. Like its protagonist, the show has also evolved from its first installment in 2020 to its last in 2024. Sushmita Sen’s Aarya Sareen has remained a fiercely protective mother and a woman with gifted self-preservation skills, but one can see tangible growth from the relatively hapless widow of Season 1 to the indefatigable force of nature in Season 3.2. In fact, Aarya really comes full circle in the first and last seasons, where she’s skeptical about the world of crime as opposed to in Seasons 2 and 3, where she’s in the eye of the storm, and to an extent, even owning it.
It’s difficult to forget the scene in Season 1 when an inconsolable Sushmita bites into the shadi ka laddoo after her husband’s murder. Season 3 starts with her enjoying a cigar by her swimming pool, yet Antim Vaar never catches her smoking; she’s mostly sipping onto wine after the day’s business at night, reflecting on the life that’s been, instead of planning the next big deal. Sushmita Sen lends so much ease to this extremely demanding and challenging arc. She’s as much at peace when she breaks down on the floor as she’s bloodying a sword. Sushmita preserves every bit of her throughout the show, only to unleash her inner Durga in the rousing finale.
Unsettling season, rousing finale
The finale itself acts as the perfect shot in the arm (no pun intended) for a deeply unsettling season. While most of Aarya immerses viewers in a sense of impending doom or portrays the weight of life-altering tragedy, the concluding season affects you in a new manner. Neither Aarya’s abiding do-gooder streak nor her conniving, resourceful ways can get her through the web of defeat life has got her into. There’s a constant sinking feeling, of an anchor weighing down your throat, that you fight – as if nothing is going to be the same again. It changes only in the last episode when Aarya comes into her own, reconciles to her fate, and lets loose like a beast with nothing to lose.
Concluding a family crime drama is a slippery slope because each generation keeps avenging the other. For instance, when Veer’s girlfriend Roop dies at the end of Season 3.1, we see him spreading her ashes to the tune of Bade Ache Lagte Hain, the same song that Aarya remembers her husband by. When Veer disowns Aarya, her mother tells her that the children can’t remain hurt by their mother – and moments later, we see Aarya hugging her mother, a woman she was hurt by.
The karma comes calling for not only Aarya, but also Khan when he loses a close associate and realizes – in his blind quest to catch Aarya red-handed, he has lost irretrievably. Daulat (Sikandar Kher), who shot their father, ends up saving Aarya’s children. Spoiler alert: And finally, Aarya, whose gangster father’s right-hand man killed her husband, ends up getting shot by her own. Spoiler alert ends.
However, some sour points remain – Sushila, portrayed by Geetanjali Kulkarni, a character expected to unravel in unexpected ways, receives short shrift this season as well, wasting a terrific actor in the process. Ila Arun did a lot of talking and posturing in the previous installment, but her menacing personality loses its sheen.
when her ways get repetitive, her son gets more annoying, and her English accent more awkward. Sushmita repeats her oath, “Maine jo bhi kiya, apne bachchon ke liye kiya” and gets exhausted, before Daulat asks her to do it, instead of saying. Snapping out of the verbal loop does help in escaping the narrative circles as well.
When you finally see Sushmita scream her lungs out and strike like a goddess, you feel that carnal instinct in your bones. You stop fretting over the fate of her family, worrying if it’s really the end of arguably India’s best show so far, and praying that the prospective prey in all of us doesn’t meet a tragic end. Like Aarya, you know the end is near, but are ready to embrace it because you’ve got the closure you need.