Kaali Peeli Tales review: Amazon MiniTV anthology is marred by overzealous dialoguebaazi, dated writing

Language: Hindi/English What started off as the patched-together leftover scraps of big filmmakers, the anthology genre, bursting with so much energy and attention from streaming platforms, has turned into a grotesque activity. Grotesque because it doesn’t take the anthology seriously — instead of long-form, stand-alone episodes tied together by a thorough theme, like Black Mirror, like Modern Love , we do short films stitched together with a barest of an excuse. The worst, probably because it was the most recent, was the thoroughly disastrous _Navarasa_ , where emotion, the bare minimum of good storytelling, became the binding force. Here, the excuse is a taxi cab. In Kaali Peeli Tales, love is in various stages of unravelling, but ultimately in the back seat of a kaali peeli — the black and yellow cab fleets that ferry anyone south of Sion, Mumbai — and with the help of a swelling score, things are sutured. Each cab is different, either a hatchback, or a sedan, or an omnibus, but the sentiment is the same — an old school romance that chooses to ignore the Uber-Ola insertion into the dwindling cab economy. But this also means that all the cabs, and thus cab drivers are different, so it doesn’t even have that as a unifying concept. (One can imagine the sweet collection of stories that a driver had access to one eventful day — but that’s an unfair criticism of this anthology, hoping from it what it didn’t even want to attempt.) All of the six 25-30 minute films are directed by Adeeb Rais, which makes one wonder why he didn’t pursue a feature film instead. Rakshit Shetty, too, did this with U_lidavaru Kandanthe_, but there each thread of the anthology was connected to a murder. Here, there is no such conceit. Instead, we get Rais’ stamp — too many dialogues, exposing everything from doubt to clarity, a density that lays bare an insecurity to tell a long story in a short span — seeping through each film that deals with love in all its variants — homosexual, heterosexual, divorced, cheated on, patient, impatient.

It begins with ‘Marriage 2.0’ which has Ashwin (Hussain Dalal) and Malini (Maanvi Gagroo) toeing the edges of fidelity in their marriage, questioning if they should open it up, but in a playful, exaggerated way that doesn’t make you doubt their love for each other. Gagroo’s and Dalal’s lived-in couplehood — where they cut each other’s comments, where they glide by each other’s gaze, the comfort with which Ashwin places his hand over the seat behind Malini as she eases into his torso — buoy the more obtuse, stilted patches of the story, which is, well, most of it.

Conversations feel like dialogues written, remembered, performed, and the rich slice-of-life pungence that Rais was clearly going for, looks like uncomfortable comedy sketches.

There is a dinner scene where Ashwin and Malini invite their office crushes, and the diagonal conversations, uncomfortable delivery, careless pauses, and random insertions of doubt and flare-ups just feel overdone and uncomfortable. Rais was trying to pull off cutesy humour and deadass kitchen sink reality side-by-side. It doesn’t work. In ‘Loose Ends’, Chris (Siddharth Menon) and Karthik (Tanmay Dhanania) are two men in love — but there is a thorny past and future. Chris was Karthik’s student in high school, but this part is brushed aside in a hasty flashback. The thornier issue is that Karthik is married and his wife (Gauhar Khan) is pregnant. This is the kind of story where, like ALT Balaji’s _His Storyy_ , infidelity and sexual awakening happen to a character simultaneously. Sadly, it is also one of those stories where characters aren’t talking to each other, but at each other, at us — telling us, informing us that sexuality isn’t a choice but a wiring. Even a touch has a radioactive quality of disgust and fear, every opportunity for discussing freedom is used, abused, and if two men could kiss in the back seat of a kaali peeli with such raw passions without being stopped or tutted at, honestly, we are in fairy tale territory. ‘Fish Fry Aur Coffee’, the thinnest story of the lot, has Sharib Hashmi and Gaurav Arora, freshly freed from 4 years in prison. Hashmi’s character was locked up for someone else’s mistake in a factory fight, while Gaurav’s character killed an innocent pedestrian while drunk driving. Two kinds of carceral victims, the former is gleeful, wrestling every moment with joy, and the latter is mournful, guilty. Both share sweet moments over coffee or fishy fry with their respective lovers, till they find each other, by coincidence at the back of the same kaali peeli. They speak of the shanti they had in jail, the sukoon they never had, and the himmat they need to move forward from the four years of wilful oblivion. Coincidence is okay, but it should feel earned. Dialogue-baazi is welcomed, but that too should feel earned, with characters having a charisma whose exaggeration we can buy into. But the anthology at this point bares its flaws on its sleeve — and over articulated mess, with brief but too few moments of profundity. [caption id=“attachment_9899431” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A snapshot from Kaali Peeli Tales trailer[/caption] Perhaps the most insufferable of the lot is ‘Love In Tadoba’, which pairs Ankit (Adeeb Rais himself), an influencer with 500k followers, with Rhea (Inayat Sood), a blogger in a resort. They are both on assignments — Ankit is paid to promote the resort, and Rhea is given an all-expense-paid trip for her blog, a subtle dig at the economy of attention. She’s from South Bombay and he’s from Bandra. (Read: she’s stuck up, and he’s new money, she’s jazz and he’s Sukhbir.) They are both caricatures, dated in writing, over-zealous in acting. They are both convinced of their humanity and the others’ lack thereof. They both fall in love, in this roundabout way. This is the first, and thankfully last time we have someone break the fourth wall — the cab driver, who until now is merely in the background, privy to hot kisses, and cold embraces as the Mumbai sea-salted wind wafts in, is suddenly thrust into our gaze, something we could have done without because it adds little to the story. With ‘Single Jhumka’, we are back in the thorny brambles of infidelity. Here, it is neither discussed as a potential idea, or mixed with the heady realisation of sexuality. Here it is already performed, a heterosexual cuckolding of an engaged couple. I kept wondering what the point of this short film is — not in terms of messaging, or craft, but just as a story. What did it want to tell? Aashima (Sayani Gupta) loses one of her jhumkas, the same night she cheats. In the end, alone in the kaali peeli — the first time we are seeing a character alone in a cab — she fondly looks at the jhumka. We are told she is honest. That the man she cheated on (Bhuvan Arora) wants to hate her but her honesty makes it hard. That even after cheating on him, when he asks if she loves him she says, “Maybe not as much as I used to. But I still love you.” It is here I realised that so many of these short films are made at the crucial crux in the life cycle of love — where the decision to be or not to has to be asked, and answered, demanding a verbosity from its characters they usually wouldn’t have. These short films are insufferably wordy by design, Rais pushing his characters to perform profundity when, honestly, silence would have sufficed. This brings us to Harra Bharra, where Vikram (Vinay Pathak) and Neena (Soni Razdan) are divorced, secure in their divorce, with Vinay’s wife sending gifts to Neena. Here, they bury their flare-ups and flirtations to come together to meet their daughter Suchi’s (Kavya Thapar) beau. This film had such promise, ending on a sweet note — all three of them singing in the backseat of the kaali peeli, packed shoulder to shoulder like canned sardines — but it ruined it with its overzealous dialogues outlining everything from the divorce to the maturity post-divorce, to the reasons for divorce. Such a thinly sketched idea is buoyed only by the sincerity in Razdan and Pathak’s gazes. But how far can a gaze take us? How many shorts can we paper through with boredom? How many excuses for monologues can be accepted before word-induced claustrophobia? When do we realise the banality of the exercise? When do they? Rating: 2.5/5 Watch the trailer here