Friday Streaming - The forced Indianness in Wedding Season on Netflix makes this rom-com very hard to watch!

Directed by Tom Dey, Wedding Season lacks flavor, depth, and soul throughout its 98 minutes.

Your parents forcing you to marry by playing the emotional card is a game, no sorry, a routine we are all too familiar with. Success will come and go, but a husband and kids are your 'forever', they say! Regardless of where you stand on the whole career vs. marriage spectrum, one thing is certain - today, we have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and that also applies to the content we consume. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most annoying, Wedding Season surely hits it out of the park with its innate ability to force 'beta' at the end of a perfectly normal sentence just like mom and dad do when they're trying to make up after having said something atrocious and not addressing it.

Cast - Pallavi Sharda plays Asha, who quit her stable banking job to work at a start-up but finds it hard to kick ass at work because her mother won't stop badgering her about getting married, which includes sending prospective grooms to her workplace. Suraj Sharma plays Ravi, an easy-going DJ with a clear sense of what he wants out of life.

Storyline - After having broken up with her fiance, Asha moves back home to Newark and immerses herself in work. Worried that she's getting too old for what's considered a marital age, her parents find new ways to emotionally blackmail her into an arranged marriage setting, the latest being setting up her profile on a matchmaking website without her consent or knowledge. Floating in the same boat, there's also Ravi, an MIT graduate who moonlights as a DJ. Forced by their parents, Ravi and Asha meet at a cafe and instantly discuss how this isn't going to work. But they're tired of nosy aunties and even nosier parents who refuse to stop making their own lives about these two 'settling down' and hence they decide to fake date each other during the upcoming wedding season.

Also Read: Friday Streaming – Being shamed into losing your virginity or terrorism and xenophobia? Indoo Ki Jawani on Netflix can’t decide what it’s really about!

Watch the trailer here!

What I liked - It's refreshing to watch a woman not have to choose between loving what she does and who she wants to be with. As infuriating as Wedding Season was, the pressure that children face to settle down even at the cost of what they want is so real, hence, it was nice to see what unwavering support from a partner looks like. Bits where Asha's father kept playing nice cop, rather the tiny moments in which he was allowed to speak in the first place in the middle of his wife's rants reminded me of one too many Indian fathers.

What I didn't quite like - Shiwani Srivastava has filled the script with so many betas and chup baitho and sure, that's exactly how our parents behave with us, but this feels forced and out of place, almost like these words are added simply for representation instead of giving it an authentic feel. Indian parents are ridiculously pushy and nosy and OTT dramatic when "I don't want to get married" is even uttered but Wedding Season doesn't make it look that seamless as that conversation feels IRL. I wish this rom-com focused more on the budding relationship between the main leads because there were glimpses of a cute relationship that got lost in all that drama. A big part of who Asha and Ravi are was woven in the work that they enjoyed doing and that needed more screentime in this one!