Modern Love Mumbai Review — Sucharita Tyagi
Some of these are good. Some of these are not. But one is exceptionally…not good.
Dekho poora review, pata chalega.
Hey, y’all! my name is Sucharita. Welcome back, this is a movie review, well a series of short movies, Modern Love, Mumbai.
I’m going to start with and spend more time on the ones which worked for me, going in descending order towards those that didn’t, starting with Hansal Mehta’s ‘Baai’, Shonali Bose’s ‘Raat Raani’, and Vishal Bhardwaj’s ‘Mumbai Dragon’. Then, Nupur Asthana’s ‘Cutting Chai’, Dhruv Sehgal’s ‘I love Thane’, and finally, Alankrita Srivastava’s ‘I Love My Wrinkles’.
Let's start with,
1. ‘Baai.’
Hansal Mehta’s ‘Baai’ is a true Mumbai story which is weird considering half of it takes place in Goa. Manzar is a gay man, growing up in a big Muslim joint-family, generational South Mumbai city land, and building owners, now left with their deteriorating building and emotional scars from the city’s moments of religious discord. Samay ke saath jaise building bikharne lagi, waisey yeh family bhi. After being outed, Manzar leaves this life behind to move to Goa and finds love but isn’t able to cut emotional ties with his grandmother, his Baai.
The cast here is INCREDIBLE. Pratik Gandhi quickly becomes a force to reckon with and it was a true delight seeing Tanuja back on screen as well. But I have to mention chef Ranveer Brar, who I just resoundingly adore, making his acting debut as far as I know. He plays Manzar’s partner, a chef who knows how to love and I assume it's an extension of his real-life personality because Ranveer is a wholesome king, we stan. These two men are grown adults, but their romance plays out like a high-school rom-com, kyunki Manzar toh never had that, usko yeh ab karne ka mauka mila.
Manzar just broke my heart. A man who as a child was taught two things, your city doesn’t like you because of your religious identity and your family doesn’t like you because of your sexual identity. Does he dare test the love of his grandmother then, his one safe space? The matriarch who’s provided for and protected the whole family, will she cast him out too? Family, Gods, Love, Food, and Home, so much to find in ‘Baai’, and love.
All right, on to the next one,
2. ‘Raat Raani’.
Shonali Bose’s Raat Raani features the best acting performance in the whole Modern Love Mumbai series, by Fatima Sana Shaikh. Again a true Mumbai story, Fatima plays Lalzari, a Kashmiri cook, who’s eloped with the man she loves and settled in Mumbai jahaan Shahrukh Khan rehta hai. But one day, when her husband decides to leave, Lalzari has no option but to put her daydreaming days on pause for a bit, until she takes control of her life.
Oof, just thinking about Fatima’s work in this one is giving me goosebumps, truly the best example of ‘WOMEN TELLING WOMEN’S STORIES’. Shonali Bose and her, work together to create a character who’s very different and yet somehow just like me. When a portion of Lalzari’s kholi ki ceiling falls down, the audience is literally getting a bird’s eye view of how she lives her life, through that hole we’re peeking through. We’re shown glimpses into her life from Sunday to Sunday because perhaps those are the only days Lalzari truly blooms.
Women everywhere are told to curb their enthusiasm and not aim for the moon and stars, but kaheen toh who energy phatt ke niklegi. And instead of imploding, Lalzari uses her suppressed emotions as a nuclear reactor, literally propelling her forward, moving her legs, riding a manual bicycle too big for her, because like everything in her life the bicycle too, has been designed for men.
The title ‘Raat Raani’, could have many interpretations most obvious of them sensual in nature. Lekin aap dekho yeh to find out just how wonderfully Shonali Bose takes these two words back.
I will fault the movie a little bit for wondering if the audience will “get it”. A metaphor about Lalzari riding her bicycle up a flyover is spread throughout the film which is great, but we perhaps didn’t need it to be repeated in dialogue like 3 times na?
But, by the end of the movie, Lalzari is allowed to daydream again, so we’re good.
Agli baat karte hain, Vishal Bhardwaj ki,
3. ‘Mumbai Dragon’.
I’m a simple person, I see Vishal Bhardwaj, and I get excited. ‘Mumbai Dragon’ itna sahi title hai, you have no idea which direction this film will go in, and when it opens with neo-noir, ‘The Wild Goose Lake’ style lighting, a woman frantically exclaiming “main kabhi dobara Hindi nahi bolungi”, you're like “OMG! SHOW ME MORE”.
Then we go back in time to track the events which have led to this moment where you don’t know if this lady is an assassin or a priest.
Lady, turns out, is a mother. Yeo Yann is Sui, a textbook helicopter parent and Meiyang Chang is her son, Ming. Sui is a caretaker by nature and circumstance. She’s a single mother not just to her son, but also to the temple she looks after, where every Chinese person immigrating to Mumbai has historically been given shelter.
Lekin when her very own son decides to leave and in a sense integrate himself into the city as a Mumbaikar, perhaps moving to the suburbs, her attempt to hold on to both thing she’s been responsible for, manifest into a rage that is only serving to make things worse.
Yeh waali bhi kaafi South Mumbai ke dil ki kahaani hai, Chinese community ki THODI si jhalak ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’ mein dikhi thi, Gangu’s dentist was Chinese, and yahaan Vishal Bhardwaj looks at it with the curiosity of a young scholar in a museum. We get a slight glance at the history of the community and how it continued to flourish.
Though I will say here that the medium used to show us these flashbacks felt zara undercooked. Wamiqa Gabbi as a journalist was underwritten, her over-the-top performance, compensating perhaps for the lack of material, didn’t help either.
The film does rush to a less than satisfactory conclusion but manages to keep it together, feeling honest. I enjoyed small additions like Anurag Kashyap playing yet another exaggerated version of himself, and Naseeruddin Shah popping in as Sui’s Cantonese-speaking, Sardar friend. Also, it’s surprisingly the only film that uses Mumbai’s trademark, the very long monsoon season as the setting.
This in fact is a film that requires a deeper analysis, because poora ek review iske oopar ban sakta hai, there is a LOT going on. Vishal Bhardwaj is a master.
Now let's go towards Nupur Asthana’s,
4. ‘Cutting Chai’.
In ‘Cutting Chai’, Nupur Asthana tells us two love stories. One told in flashbacks about a love that may or may not be now diminishing, another about a woman’s unwavering love for Mumbai. The stunning Chitrangada Singh is Latika, a writer struggling with her first novel.
Caught in the entrapments of life of a mother, she’s quickly approaching a point where she’s beginning to resent her life choices and wondering if she’s made all the wrong decisions and if there are more Latika’s in the multiverse living the life she deserved.
These ponderings could EASILY take many dark turns, but that isn’t the story Nupur Asthana is telling. Rooted in her present reality, as Latika relives her past, she also reminds herself of what she has in the present. Arshad Warsi is Daniel, her husband, a manager at the taj hotel. This one, of all the stories tbh, is ‘Modern Love’.
Struggling to not lose their individual personalities under the pressure of earning money and hence being devoted to their jobs in a big city, ‘Cutting Chai’, as the title suggests, is Latika’s attempt to remind herself how this very city can enable her to realize her true potential if she develops a positive outlook towards it.
As a writer, her imagination runs wild and people around her begin to sing and dance wherever she goes, which was fun to watch, but the film doesn’t commit to this quirkiness and unfortunately becomes trope-y too fast. Arshad Warsi is beyond delightful, the joy of a Christmas morning and Diwali dinner rolled into human form. A sweet, perfectly watchable film, if not particularly moving.
Next, let’s talk about Dhruv Sehgal’s,
5. ‘I love Thane’.
Masaba Gupta is Saiba, a landscape artist. Tired of looking for a good match, she’s focusing on her career and has landed a job with the local Thane government. Here she meets Parth, a young sarkaari official, born and raised in Thane and thoda nain matakka happens.
‘I love Thane’ tries too hard to be too light, and the attempt shows. The dialogue is meant to be realistic and breezy but comes across as contrived and scripted. Texts popping on screen as two people chat with each other hasn’t been novel or cute for a while, and at the end of the film, I knew nothing and didn’t care about Saiba. I know she has a narcissistic best friend who starts talking about her bajillion life problems, including an ongoing divorce when Saiba tries to share her woes. And I know Thane is pretty.
*shrug*
Lastly, the film which didn’t work for me at all, ulta it made me borderline mad,
6. ‘My Beautiful Wrinkles’.
Alankrita Srivastava’s ‘My Beautiful Wrinkles’ stars a beautiful Sarika, who has been saddled with a terrible character to play. She’s a single woman, a grandparent, and what seems like a book curator person at a book store, she finds out the young man she has befriended is in love with her, when he says so in as many words. Well not as many words, he says he fantasizes about having sex with her while promptly handing her a naked sketch he’s drawn of her from his imagination.
The movie just incidentally happens to be set in Mumbai, the dubbing is weird, it barely feels like a short film and there is an outstanding lack of depth or any real emotion. Not sure which ‘Modern Love’ story it's been adapted from, but just saying “I'm moving to Malad”, doesn’t make it a Mumbai story. It doesn’t feel Modern, it doesn’t feel like love.
You cannot pay me to take seriously a movie where bad young actors say things like “bro, come in for a drink”. The young boy is shown to be an introvert who doesn’t go to parties, instead pretends to have make-believe parties of his own at home, but has not one issue with telling a grandmother he wants to have sex with her, who is this guy and how can I make sure I never meet him.
‘Modern Love, Mumbai’ works, but very strictly in parts. While some acting performances are incredible, some truly are terrible. While some stories capture the city’s soul and essence, some could be set in Delhi and would still feel the same. Modern Love original Amazon prime par dekh kar, nearly harr episode mein royi hoon main, it doesn’t need to be the most unexpected story, but just knowing that these are real, these truly happened to someone, goes a long way to add to the experience. I missed that overwhelming sense of how people’s paths cross just randomly one day and their whole lives change. Having said that do watch the series on Prime Video, kuch na kuch toh mil hi jaayega.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Modern Love Mumbai is…..2.5 stories work out of the 6 only. What about you, bataao comments mein?
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