Maja Ma is Madhuri Dixit’s most courageous film to date

There is a delicious self-referential moment in Amazon Prime Video’s perky and precocious and eminently amiable and thought-provoking Maja Ma where the very talented Gajraj Rao playing the incandescent Madhuri Dixit’s husband says to his son. “When we have M.F. Hussain at home why do we need to look for a painter outside?”

The iconic Ms Dixit, it may be recalled, was Hussain’s muse in Gaja Gamini. She has come a long way, and thankfully roles that do her exquisite beauty and abundant talent justice are still being written for her.

Maja Ma may look like a never-ending garba festival from the outside (why do films set in Gujarati households have to be so garba-fixated?). Dig deeper, and you get an inspiring film on the choices that we make in life, and do we have to live with them until the end of our lives even if they kill us bit by bit each day?

In what is unarguably her most challenging and courageous role to date Madhuri plays Pallavi Patel, a middle-class housewife in Baroda with a devoted husband and two grownup children. The son Tejas (Ritwik Bhowmik)’s marriage to an NRI is the setting for what can only be described as a wedding from hell.

Rajit Kapur and Sheeba Chadha are a riot as the NRI girl Esha’s parents. If their American accents won’t kill you, their fascination with Indian sanskaar will. Speaking on why they chose a middle-class Indian son-in-law Rajit Kapur drawls to the embarrassed boy’s super-embarrassed parents, “It’s so difficult to find a virgin boy these days. We were so happy to hear your son is a virgin.”

The chastity belt is on the house.

The hilarious middle class-Gujju-family-versus-uppity-NRIs equation is explored with teasing affection by writer Sumit Batheja and director Anand Tiwari. However, budget constraints obstruct the best of intentions. An important airport sequence seems to have been shot on the front steps of a mall.

At times the narrative goes astray. A whole elaborate joke about a character becoming visibly aroused after an overdose of a sex-stimulant medication overstays its welcome. But there is a wonderful midair cablecar confrontation sequence featuring a very quiet Madhuri and a very vocal Simone Singh who puts the NRI mom Sheeba Chadha in her place; it had me cheering and whistling.

Don’t let the riotous surface fool you. Maja Ma is a pensive mother-daughter film at heart. Madhuri Dixit as Pallavi the tranquil housewife forced out of the closet at a monstrously inopportune time, conveys the stillness of an ocean. She is incredibly poised (as always) and fearless(as she was in Mrityudand) while playing a woman who has everything to lose by her sudden outing.

Gajraj Rao as her simple unassuming naïve husband is heartbreaking in his honest portrayal of a man who doesn’t know what ‘lesbian’ means. The feisty Shristi Shrivastava as Pallavi’s LGBTQ-supportive daughter Tara is the other backbone of this powerful though flawed story. Some of the plotting is too convenient and in the effort to come to a satisfactory conclusion the screenplay makes soft convenient choices towards the end which do not go with the film’s intrinsic strengths.

Yes, Maja Ma could have been a better film. What we do get is more than what most films on unconventional subjects can afford to give us. And just the joy of hearing Simone Singh slap Sheeba Chadha with a clitoral missile is compensation enough for all the sins of political-correctness anxiety and the ensuing overwriting the film suffers from.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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