Modern Love: Mumbai review — Fatima Sana Shaikh, Vishal Bhardwaj rescue the tame, stilted anthology

Language: Hindi Modern Love has by now become a bonafide 21st-century institution. Over the years, the carefully-edited first-person essays have not just become the definitive definition of romance but also transmuted that cachet into making the messy entanglements of the heart look like a thirst trap. Since launching as a weekly New York Times column in 2004, Modern Love has spawned a book, a star-studded podcast, two seasons of a television show, and now, a spinoff series that sets its sights on India, a country where love is both currency and weapon.   Modern Love: Mumbai, the first installment of the series (Modern Love: Chennai and Modern Love: Hyderabad are next on the roster) arrives at a time of genuine anthology fatigue. Since Netflix’s _Lust Stories_ (2018) — and maybe with the slight exception of Prime Video’s _Unpaused: Naya Safar _ (2022) — Hindi anthologies have consistently struggled to locate a coherent voice. By that I mean, they lack consistency and a genuine purpose. In that sense, Modern Love: Mumbai also arrives in a low-stakes landscape of streaming, where even the bare minimum ends up seeming like a giant leap.   Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, Shonali Bose, Hansal Mehta, Dhruv Sehgal, Alankrita Shrivastava, and Nupur Asthana, the six stories in the series are adapted from a bunch of global Modern Love essays (Shrivastava’s episode for instance, is an amalgamation of two essays). That means Modern Love: Mumbai starts out as a very different undertaking than the original series — unlike John Carney’s screen adaptation, Modern Love: Mumbai (Carney serves as executive producer here) isn’t meant to be a faithful recreation.  

Rather, the task at hand for the six filmmakers is to take the essence of a story out of its natural habitat, re-contextualise its beats in a way that convinces viewers that it’s possible to envision it in a city like Mumbai. That alone makes Modern Love: Mumbai an adaptation in the truest sense of the word, considering its primary job is to build new vantage points to tell a familiar story. And yet, the series falters to assert its own voice. Of the six segments, only two actually succeed in turning the art of adaptation into a credible craft, two struggle to reach somewhere, one is promptly forgettable, and the remaining short is a complete washout.   I’ll start with the standout short of the series. Mumbai Dragon, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, is a clever piece of commentary disguised as black comedy, one that manages to condense the paradox of a country perpetually stuck in a debate between tradition and modernity, insiders and outsiders, and between daydreams and fate, in under half an hour. It is efficient and effective storytelling at its finest. Set presumably in Mazgaon’s Chinatown, the plot revolves around Ming (a superb Meiyang Chang), an aspiring 20-something Indo-Chinese singer who finds himself in a warring match with his territorial mother (Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann in outstanding form) after his Jain girlfriend’s (Wamiqa Gabbi) eating habits threatens to disrupt the family status quo. [caption id=“attachment_10668701” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Yeo Yann Yann, Meiyang Chang in a still from Modern Love Mumbai[/caption] Megha is not only vegetarian but also doesn’t touch garlic, a staple ingredient in Cantonese cuisine. “How will you live without garlic?,” the feral-like old lady asks her son, demanding that he marry within the community instead of spending time with the “vegetarian witch.” For Ming’s mother, Megha acts as a physical reminder of the many ways her Chinese ancestors have had to suppress parts of themselves to be accepted as citizens of the country. Fearing that Ming might meet the same fate if he considers a future with Megha, she holds on to her son tightly, as if losing him is akin to losing their individuality. But when he refuses to yield to her desires, she resorts to emotional blackmail, which includes vowing to not speak a word of Hindi until her son is freed from the clutches of vegetarianism.   Hiding underneath a kooky exterior is a rare narrative that manages to tell multiple stories within one story: On one hand, Bhardwaj, credited for the screenplay along with Jyotsna Hariharan, underlines the long history of Mumbai’s multiculturality, contrasting it with the city’s vanishing Chinese community. And by centring a Indo-Chinese immigrant family, on the other hand, Mumbai Dragon flips long-standing prejudices on its head, whether it is the perpetually bubbling anti-Chinese sentiment in the country, the intolerance towards eating meat, or the imposition that Hindi is the national language of a population of over a billion. Even the villainisation of vegetarianism for instance, drawn up primarily for laughs, lays bare the ludicrousness of a right-wing government priding homogeneity.

In that sense, Mumbai Dragon is foremost, an impossibly moving and well-crafted tale about the kind of love that suffocates and the kind that liberates.  

If all of these threads succeed in landing with a thud, it’s due to the sheer level of technical creativity on display. For a series that relays a frustrating over-reliance on flashbacks as a narrative device, Bhardwaj reimagines the flashback as an immersive set piece. Even the sub-plots do so much with so little, especially one that involves Ming auditioning for Anurag Kashyap’s (the filmmaker has a lot of fun appearing as himself, mouthing the film’s best one-liner) next film inside an urinal, is especially rewarding. The film’s world-building and production design are impeccable, bracing mood with rhythm. Reuniting with his Omkara and Kaminey cinematographer Tassaduq Hussain, Bhardwaj creates magnetic imagery: dimsums, noodles, and stir-fried eggplant appear like poetry in motion. Some of the food sequences directly call Bong Joon-Ho and Hirokazu Kore-eda to mind — it’s no coincidence then that the eventual act of reconciliation occurs inside a kitchen.   Unburdening familial shackles with a plate of food has a starring role even in Hansal Mehta’s Baai. Adapted from one of the more touching Modern Love essays (the screenplay is by Mehta and Ankur Pathak), the short is arguably the most frustrating to watch. There’s great promise in Baai — the screenplay for one, makes a neat job of contextualising the story of a gay man having to keep his husband a secret from his dying grandmother, but it doesn’t quite come together.   [caption id=“attachment_10663291” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Ranveer Brar, Pratik Gandhi in a still from Modern Love Mumbai[/caption] The selling point is of course, the film’s progressive politics: Baai centres a traumatised Muslim family in the wake of the 1992 Mumbai riots (Pratham Mehta’s camera documents the horrors of the riots in a nauseating flashback set-piece) and features a Muslim-Hindu queer couple (Pratik Gandhi, Ranveer Brar) at a time when love-jihad has become a war-cry. There’s a queer wedding that takes place in Goa, a sister standing by her bullied brother’s freedom to love whoever he wants, and a grandmother who doesn’t think of her grandchild’s sexual orientation as a “disease.” It’s a compassionately-mounted coming-of-age tale, one that is at least alert to the changing ways of the world on paper.   On screen, the film becomes a victim of its clunky execution, constantly giving the feeling that you’re being sold something instead of being told a story. I’m not entirely certain that Mehta was the correct choice to helm this particular story. It needed, to my mind, a lighter touch — someone who could employ silence to show the simmering tenderness between two men in love as opposed to vigorously underlining it. A beach altercation between Brar and Gandhi is staged so awkwardly that I was surprised it found its way into the movie. The same is the case with a scene where Brar and Gandhi share a kiss for the first time, which is terribly directed and lazily shot. In both these sequences, the fact that two straight actors are “playing” queer characters becomes unfortunately apparent, which in turn prevents the movie from evoking any feeling.

Although Brar is an inspired casting choice, it doesn’t help that he appears stilted in many scenes, often forgetting that an actor’s job is to turn a piece of dialogue into a conversation. The writing is similarly on-the-nose. A parent’s sudden change of heart is left unexplained, becoming nothing more than a product of narrative contrivance. The screenplay is without question, marred by cheesy dialogue that is hell-bent on manufacturing sympathy. I don’t think the film would have needed any of that had it paid more attention to the story it was trying to tell.   That’s certainly not the problem with Shonali Bose’s invigorating Raat Rani, a film that surprised me like no other. What Bose manages with the short can only be described as a magic trick: the filmmaker takes a by-the-books story about a woman asserting her own identity after her husband suddenly leaves her with a lone cycle, and transforms it into cinematic gold. By imagining Laila (Fatima Sana Shaikh) as a woman of Kashmiri descent, Raat Raani builds a story of female emancipation that could very well act as a stand-in for socio-political commentary. It’s also why Laila’s inner turmoil feels so vividly realised. Shaikh, whose eyes are their own world, steals every single scene in the film. She alternates between breaking down uncontrollably and getting hot-tempered uncontrollably and Shaikh on her part, perfects the secret to conveying emotion without taking refuge in a single piece of dialogue. The kind of physically alert acting that the actress delivers in Raat Raani connects the dots between setting, context, and feeling.  

If anything, Laila feels like a course correction for the bit roles that have started coming Shaikh’s way in the last few years. Shaikh, a gifted actor, is deserving of so much more and Raat Raani offers the actress the perfect playground to display her talents. It’s a treat to watch Shaikh be so uninhibited and give it her all — much like Laila, I hope Shaikh’s turn, easily my favourite performance of the anthology, propels her second coming.   Watching Dhruv Sehgal’s I Love Thane after Raat Rani feels like a strangely insipid affair. I say strange because the segment is possibly the anthology’s most traditional romantic story, an easy sell considering it features Masaba Gupta and Ritwick Bhowmick, who happen to be two of the most natural actors around. Indeed, both actors are terrific in the film — Bhowmick, one of Bengali cinema’s brightest talents, brings a fascinating, robotic-like stillness to Parth, a government officer who finds happiness in routine. And as Saiba, a 34-year-old single freelancing woman actively searching for love in disappointing dating app matches, Gupta is practically effortless, making acting look as easy as eating cake. Sparks fly, slowly, then all at once, when the duo walk into each other’s lives on a work assignment.

And yet, there’s something that just doesn’t fit. The writing (I Love Thane is co-written by Sehgal and his Little Things collaborator Nupur Pai) evidently suffers from an acute _Little Things_ hangover. You get the sense that these are creators who are unknowingly repeating themselves. It feels as if the plot is written keeping in mind 20-something characters but acted out instead by characters in their early 30s. The tone of the filmmaking, right down to the observations, banter, and tracking shots accompany a feeling of sameness, as if they’re assembled together to recreate an already existing love language and not necessarily invent one. It’s as non-challenging as an outing can get. Speaking of non-challenging, I didn’t take much to either Alankrita Shrivastava’s My Beautiful Wrinkles or Nupur Asthana’s Cutting Chai. The former episode, starring (a completely miscast) Sarika and Danesh Razvi, details the unexpected attraction that develops between Dilbar, a 60-something grandmother carrying a heavy secret and a young man, almost 30 years younger than her. While the latter is a wholly bland episode that felt like it existed for no other reason other than to honour the Carney tradition of guaranteeing all six stories intersect in the final episode.  

Respectively written by Shrivastava and Devika Bhagat — also credited as the series consultant writer — the stories of both episodes itself feels like a placeholder. Here, the action revolves around Latika (Chritangada Singh), a 30-something homemaker whose writerly ambitions appear lost under the weight of the gendered domestic labour that accompanies even the most loving — and seemingly equal — marriages. One day after a terse exchange of words with Danny (a very enjoyable Arshad Warsi), Latika revisits the trajectory of her own life, wondering whether it is indeed time to change the characters in her own life.   I could almost see both My Beautiful Wrinkles and Cutting Chai become something arresting — examination of middle-aged women who catch themselves by surprise in the mirror, realizing that they’re just watching their lives pass by. But both these stories boast similar flaws: the screenplays are too attached to clean endings to even hint at the complexities that lurk within, whether it is in inquiring about Dilbar’s ingrained ageism or delivering a eulogy for a female artist held prisoner in her marriage. Even the flights of fantasy, such as a recurring musical device in which passengers at a railway platform sing words of advice to Latika, appear saccharine and disjointed in the same way that a striking non-flashback scene involving Dilbar in a bathtub is reduced to over-exposition in the climax. As a result, both are easily forgettable, as much low-effort as it is a low-reward outing.

That Modern Love: Mumbai doesn’t quite feel like a surefire success — more than half of the show isn’t as instructive or imaginative, its honesty appearing more staged than authentic (the title-credit sequence is prime example) — point toward the one storytelling decision I can’t wrap my head around. It’s baffling that makers didn’t feel the need to look at even one India-specific Modern Love essay as source material — especially if the idea was to add cultural specificity to the universal language of love. Wouldn’t translating the accounts of love, loss, and belonging from the subcontinent onscreen made for a more subversive outing? “These tales shock and instruct,” Daniel Jones, longtime editor of the Modern Love column wrote in his introduction to the 2019 book, adding “Always they pry open the oyster shell of human love to reveal the dark beauty within.” If you were to ask, I can’t confidently claim that Modern Love: Mumbai succeeds in unravelling any kind of darkness. Instead, it feels muffled for much of its runtime, content in endorsing empty takeaways about love and second chances … just existing.   Modern Love: Mumbai is streaming on Prime Video.

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on  Twitter. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.