Review: Modern Love - Mumbai
Modern Love: Mumbai is the first Indian chapter (Modern Love: Hyderabad and Chennai are on the roster) to the acclaimed American anthology of the same name. It opens with the same words as its American counterpart: “Inspired by personal essays from The New York Times column Modern Love. Certain elements have been fictionalized.”
Curiously, this made me wonder if a city like Bombay does not have its own stories, that we need to take stories from the New York Times. I’m sure our cities are brimming with such love stories too.
Anyway, Modern Love Mumbai works beyond ‘butterflies’ to explore six unique yet universal stories of human connection and love in its varied forms. For me, two shorts, in particular, stand out, but I’ll come to those in the end.
Starting with Alankrita Srivastava’s My Beautiful Wrinkles and Nupur Asthana’s Cutting Chai – they’re the weakest in the lot. Both look overly designed, where the idea of the city overwhelms the idealism of a love story. None of them have enough substance to propel the story forward.
Srivastava’s short follows Dilbar (Sarika), a modern grandmother who smokes on her terrace, and who grapples with the guilt of her past. Her carefully crafted defense is broken when a young man (a really bland Danesh Razvi) starts to stride into her heart. Her short explores this love between a confident older woman and a boy unsure of how to sell himself to the world.
The next, Asthana’s Cutting Chai starring Chitrangda Singh and Arshad Warsi, builds sufficient intrigue but struggles to sustain the tension. Singh plays an ambitious writer who loses her charm after marriage and children. The short follows her story of re-discovery on a day spent at the landmark CST station. Interestingly, Singh’s character is named Latika, which I thought is a nice ode to Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning Mumbai movie in which CST station played a definitive role.
Chitrangda Singh and Arshad Warsi in a still from Nupur Asthana’s Cutting Chai.
However, in the short, Latika’s flashbacks are clumsily woven in. Interior monologue, flashbacks, and psychological projections take over the screen. Along with all of this, yet another Mumbai monologue dominates. All of this distracts from what could have been a tender marriage of perspective and time.
Possibly the anthology’s most traditional romantic story, featuring Masaba Gupta and Ritwick Bhowmick, is Dhruv Sehgal’s I Love Thane.
Masaba Gupta and Ritwik Bhowmick in a still from Dhruv Sehgal’s I Love Thane.
Gupta plays an architect, who is keen on keeping the natural greenery relevant. On a project, she meets a government employee, Parth (Bhowmick). Romance kindles between them, and their approaches to life and love make it an interesting watch leading to a satisfying climax.
Next, comes Hansal Mehta’s Baai - which explores the challenges of coming out in a seemingly-modern society that often keeps its real views on same-sex love in the closet. It explores love and inclusivity through the language of food and music.
The film opens with the family car snaking through the shadowy by lanes of town instead of the main roads, signifying deep-rooted trauma and social invisibility.
Mehta teams up with his Scam 1992 team once again – DOP Pratham Mehta and artist Pratik Gandhi, to create quite a slow-paced film, that lays bare the democratic nature of intolerance. Baai stars Gandhi as Manzu, a gay, middle-aged Muslim man who is struggling to explain his sexuality to his family. On its surface, it is a plain love story. But it’s the powerful cultural context at play that defines the film.
Manzu’s doting grandmother (Tanuja) doesn’t know about his preferences. He shares a warm bond with her, and eventually, the film leads up to whether he tells her about his partner. Baai has a tender core, but misses the most important ingredient in a coming-out film: confidence.
The whole film is spelled out at the end when Manzu’s mother says: “Preventing love is also like spreading hate.”
What really got to me in Baai was that the love between Manzu and his partner (played by chef Ranveer Brar) was as fake as it could get. Bodies brushing against one another, and the kissing seemed just too ‘staged’ – our old school flowers would’ve done a better job than Gandhi and Brar.
Coming to the next entry - the first episode of the series that stars Dangal actor Fatima Sana Shaikh, who carries this Shonali Bose directorial on her shoulders. Titled Raat Raani, this short, follows the story of Lalzari, a spunky Kashmiri housemaid in Mumbai coming to terms with the heartbreak of being ghosted by her husband.
We are told the stories via passing Sundays, probably the only time Lalzari gets the day off. In one sequence, we are also shown her broken hatchment through a bird’s eye view, giving us a glimpse of the way, she lives.
Shaikh steals every single scene in the film. She swings for fences, with both accent and spirit. She alternates between breaking down uncontrollably in front of her employers, to getting hot-tempered uncontrollably when she realizes her husband has left her. Through her performance, she perfects the secret to conveying emotion without taking refuge in a single piece of dialogue. It’s an example of how the actress plays with volume rather than tone.
A cycle becomes a heavy-handed metaphor of progression. The Bandra-Worli Sea Link becomes an allegory for breaking free. In her loftiest moments, she taunts the sky. A beautiful background score about ‘curfew’ compliments her loftiest moments.
Lali is hands-down one of the most loveable characters of the anthology, teaching us how to love ourselves, and how one can achieve freedom, even in abandonment.
Coming to one of my favorite shorts in the anthology, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Mumbai Dragon. Like Mehta’s, this short too, ties in the aspect of love with food.
This clash-of-culture story represents the Chinese community in the city. Interestingly, it is also the only short in the entire anthology to make use of Mumbai’s rain.
The film stars Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann as Sui Mei, a third-generation Chinese immigrant in Mumbai whose battle to preserve the roots of her fading community is reflected in her stifling love for a son Ming. (Meiyang Chang). Her son gets a new girlfriend – a vegetarian, garlic-averse Gujarati (Wamiqa Gabbi) – whose arrival threatens Sui. She then, as every mother would, treats his weekend visits with tiffins of homemade Chinese food, as a device to impose her territory.
The film is beautifully designed with two love stories at play here - mother-son and boy-girl – with one struggling to concede ground to the other. A mother’s cooking as an extension of the umbilical cord, the use of language (Sui’s Hindi, Ming’s sparse Cantonese) as a generational gap with a one-way bridge, and Naseeruddin Shah’s wise Sikh presence, all punctuate elements in the film. The film also has a special appearance of Anurag Kashyap, who threatens to send an assistant “to Motwane” if he doesn’t behave.
Overall, this film also hit very close to home. I saw a lot of my own mother in Yeo Yann Yann’s perceptive performance as Sui.
We have seen ample films villainize a parent’s inability to let go. But Mumbai Dragon humanizes this conflict with empathy and humour. Bharadwaj also ends his film with a shot of food that underlines the long history of Mumbai’s multiculturality, contrasting it with the city’s vanishing Chinese community. In that sense, Mumbai Dragon is an impossibly moving and well-crafted tale about the kind of love that suffocates and the kind that liberates.
Overall, Modern Love: Mumbai has somewhat been a successful experiment by all means. Each story tries its best to be full of warmth, and of course, love, as you root for characters, who are broken, complex, and fixed, as they navigate their lives, re-discovering their interests, themselves, and their love.