For Netflix India, this is the season for romantic comedies (rom-coms)—Emily in Paris, starring Phil Collin’s daughter Lily, was the one I binge-watched over a night, soaking in the sights and food experiences of the French capital, and I have just finished seeing Ginny Weds Sunny, a soul-warming Karol Bagh romance that centres around emotions and paneer, the two must-haves of a Punjabi life, as a character in the film famously puts it. What struck me most was the centrality of food in both rom-coms.
The Mr Darcy in Emily in Paris is a chef who every woman wants on her plate— played by French model and actor Lucas Bravo, the chef, Gabriel, is a rising cookery star with a bustling restaurant, who, by the end of Season One, leaves Emily, an American who takes up a social marketing job in Paris, with conflicted emotions, even as he breaks up with his girlfriend, the daughter of a wine producer in Champagne, and a good friend of Emily’s.
In Ginny Weds Sunny, Vikrant ‘A Death in the Gunj’ Massey, who plays a hardware shop owner’s son Sunny, is obsessed with the idea of opening his own restaurant where tandoori chicken would be king.
He keeps cooking at home, which spurs his mother, even as she agonises over his inability to get any woman to marry him, to comment wryly that at the rate at which the family was having two dinners in a day, they would soon deplete their rations! Sunny, though, does find his way into the heart of the seemingly unattainable Ginny (played memorably by Uri: A Surgical Strike star Yami Gautam) by cooking matar-paneer for her and getting it delivered to her office and then digging the dinner they have at her favourite dhaba, which her ex-boyfriend would avoid like the plague. Even their relationship, after several twists and turns, gets sealed over kadha-parshad at a Delhi gurudwara. The stomach, indeed, is the best way to a person’s heart.