In the first ten minutes of this film, the leading man and his boss make out on the floor of her office whilst a talking Donald Trump model watches them. Then the two protagonists meet at a wedding and sing along to the energetic and surprisingly catchy ‘Chicken Dance’. This is everything I want from a rom-com, if I’m being honest, and I’ve watched a fair few.
Love Per Square Foot is one of the latest film offerings by Netflix, an Indian rom-com with a relatively simple premise, considering the time-travel and magic and convoluted twists of fates others in the genre seem to need. The plot is this: in the overpopulated city of Mumbai, two people, in (obviously unsatisfactory) relationships with other people, decide to apply for a loan intended for married couples together.
Instead of falling in love, getting married, and then getting a house, as is traditional, they opt for the opposite. And it’s fantastic to watch. (It also helps that the two leads are unfairly attractive and charismatic). Just as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fell in love over the newly developed email system, we millennials can fall in love over the housing crisis.
It’s not perfect – like most rom-coms, it relies on tropes and the plot seems to fold in on itself towards the end, with increasingly silly reasons to keep the two main characters apart. Some of the humour falls on the slapstick side. But here, I argue: what’s so wrong with that? It’s Oscar season: you have plenty of other options of films to watch if you want to be challenged or especially moved. But if you have an empty evening and maybe a bottle of wine or some chips and dip you’ve been saving, this is the perfect, feel-good film to watch.