Is it any surprise Mithila Gupta, creator of SBS’s latest romance drama Four Years Later loves Shah Rukh Khan?
An eight-episode series following Jaipur newlyweds Sri and Yash who must reconnect in Sydney after four years apart, it’s easy to see the imprint of blockbusters like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in how expansive the series feels, and the way it coalesces past and present.
“I feel nostalgia sometimes when there’s no nostalgia there; there’s something about how we look back at our past, depending on how we’re feeling in that moment, that I’m really fascinated by,” Gupta says.
But Four Years Later is a tenderly rendered saga far from the grand gestures of Bollywood, or even the broad strokes with which migration stories have been painted previously.
Moving to Sydney with her family when she was four, Gupta’s early education on love and relationships came from Hindi cinema and watching her parents’ build a new life. In lockdown, after limited dating success, she entered her own movielike long-distance relationship.
‘I was like, I give up. I’m not doing this anymore,” she remembers. “My dad took my Hinge profile, and he started swiping and he landed on my husband and said ‘you should go for this one, he has a very honest face’…so I went on a date with him. We were separated over lockdown for five months… now we’re married. In many ways, that was a modern arranged marriage.”
The highs and lows of maintaining a relationship over zoom inspired her to write this authentic romance series which keenly observes the stinging agony of love just as much as it does the giddy passion.
A celebration of South Asian success, the series features compelling performances from Shahana Goswami (Bombay Begums, A Suitable Boy) and Akshay Ajit Singh (24: India), writing from Nicole Reddy and S. Shakthidharan, and original music from Isha Ram Das, featuring L Fresh the Lion.
The series also breaks new ground in its depictions of intimacy, refreshingly upfront in showing South Asian desire.
“I have never really seen anything that inspired me to feel sexy, or emotionally open or like I could be a leader,” Gupta says. “When it comes to sexuality, I feel like we’ve got a glossy version, but not the real version, and if we have had the real version, it surely hasn’t been starring South Asians.”
It’s earnest, detailed storytelling that rivals that of streaming hits Normal People and One Day – both of which have tonally influenced the series and demonstrate the appetite for honest romance dramas.
“My tongue-in-cheek pitch for Four Years Later was that this is Normal People, but with brown people,” Gupta laughs. “It was really great to have that as a reference so people could get a grasp of intimacy and love and the pace of storytelling.”
But Four Years Later doesn’t simply ride on coattails; it blends romance genre sensibilities with Indian culture in a way never seen before on our screens. It ascribes the modern romance’s hallmark tenderness to an arranged marriage, challenging even the hardest MAFS-watching cynics to see the joy and affection possible through our cultural matchmaking.
“The kind of philosophy I’ve always been told is that love grows,” reflects Gupta. “I think sometimes outside of the arranged marriage culture, we expect love to slap us across the face and everything to fall into place. I’m guilty of that also. But I just think there’s something beautiful about arranged marriage.”
Equally, it pushes the envelope for migrant storytelling, jettisoning the doe-eyed foreigner trope with tequila drinking, freewheeling Sri, and moving beyond simplistic representations of racism and homesickness through nuances in characterisations and language.
“I didn’t want to tell a story about race politics, but I couldn’t tell a story without race politics,” says Gupta. “What we went for is ‘what are the more unexpected, more nuanced moments?’ We found [the character of] Arun, an Indian bloke who’s been born and brought up here and spent a lifetime trying to fit in and who doesn’t want to lose that a far more exciting antagonist than a bully white guy.”
Set to premiere nationally on SBS, Gupta feels dizzy with excitement at the prospect of audiences connecting with the multi-layered storytelling.
“I want specifically people of a similar culture to mine to feel seen because we haven’t really had a chance on Aussie screens. But I want anyone who watches this to find an element that they can relate to,” she says.
“As the series goes on, you’ll find that even the Australian locals and even the people of diaspora, everyone’s an outsider in one way or another in this story. And I think that’s probably true to a lot of the isolation we all feel as humans.”
All 8 episodes of Four Years Later will be available to stream free on SBS On Demand from Wednesday 2 October, with double episodes premiering on SBS each Wednesday at 9.20pm.
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