CAST: VIHAAN SAMAT, SUCHITRA PILLAI, JIM SARABH, RAHUL BOES, ANKUR RATHEE
DIRECTED BY RAHUL NAIR
In our personal opinion movies and shows where people have inner voices which keep talking to them their inner thoughts almost never work, mainly because that inner voice become a very irritating disturbance for the narrative.
For Eternally Confused and Eager to Love,it becomes so exasperating that we needed to take a break. Not only because that internal voice wasn’t his own but of a make believe com character Wiz with the voice of Jim Sarbh( who we otherwise really like) but here every time he spoke we felt like picking up a book and throwing it at the screen.
The trailer of the show was so compelling that we seriously were eagerly looking forward to it; so much so that we even had a little feud as to who in our team will get to review it but as we sat through our Friday afternoon episode after episode of wanting to murder Wiz, we wished we had not.
Ray (Vihaan Samat) is an awkward 24-year-old manchild whose inner soliloquy is in the voice of a comic book character named “Wiz” (Jim Sarbh). He carries the character with him all the time on a keychain, and has pictures of him in his work cubicle and at home
His parents (Suchitra Pillai, Rahul Bose) can’t figure their son out. They have discussions around him about his sexuality and his life without really respecting him so they try to micromanage his life
His cubicle neighbor Varun (Ankur Rathee) urges Ray to talk to a haphazard woman at a bar, but the frustrating inner Wiz first encourages him and discourages him giving us an insight into a very irritating inner Ray who we immediately want to bury six feet under unless he embarrasses himself further. But he does and he keeps at it episode after episode.
Ray finally agrees to let his parents set him up, especially when he sees a picture of the woman he’s going to go out with. But he chickens out when he gets to the bar, hiding when she comes in to meet him. “Oh my god; we’re gonna make an angel cry,” says Wiz his inner eff up. “Fuck, man, what a fuckup you are.”
Eternally Confused And Eager For Love, created and directed by Rahul Nair, is the rare show whose most saleable feature Jim Sarabh’s voice is also its most infuriating one. That Wiz is so extremely invasive that you feel its in your way of watching the whole damn show. Sorry Jim..
Listen, we’ve get Ray. He is one of those adults who has no idea how to behave around women or other people for that matter. He also has very low EQ.
We really empathize with him in the first couple of episodes but then somewhere when he starts taking Wiz seriously you feel like kicking the jimmy out of that guy to tell him to go get perspective. Why the violent reaction? That voice. That damn, perpetual voice.
The story presents no background on why the hell Ray is so weak in his head and remains so low on self-esteem. Then there is no evolution in his character through the season. Ray remains as clueless at the beginning of the show as he is at the end of the season. Why the hell didn’t he head for therapy somewhere in the middle?
So we leave it a Meh.
Our first for a Zoya/ Farhan prod. Btw.
