Mind The Malhotras’ second season is even more fun

The very talented pair Mini Mathur and Cyrus Sahukar are not a real-life couple. I mention this, as they look so compatible, the spousal conflicts suggesting incurable incompatibility and all, that many would be fooled into believing that the two actors are an actual couple.

Disabuse yourselves, dear spectators. Applause Entertainment’s Mind The Malhotras, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, which is now in its second season, owes its high watchability potential to the lead actors who occupy almost every frame. Mathur and Sahukar are intelligent actors who know how to ingest their characters with the right doses of credibility without making them look like overprepared actors playing a squabbling pair.

Here I refer to the awful over-rehearsed marital-tiff sequence in Karan Johar ’s Jugjugg Jeeyo where Varun Dhawan and Kiara Advani looked, not like a couple at loggerheads, but like two actors trying to show marital stress in a distressfully dishonest tone.

Mathur and Sahukar look real even when their marital conflicts generate the most absurd humor. For example, the wife Shefali (the Chef) has a new neighbour ( Samir Kochhar ) who is her old college flame.

Now, this neighbour and his flatmate are gay. But this, Shefali (a.k.a Chef) can’t say. For, in the closet, they stay. Until then, Shefali’s husband Rishabh shall fret thinking his wife’s gone astray.

The fact that a lot of the situations and lines in the lives of the Malhotras are taken from the Israeli comedy La Famiglia, helps to give the romcom a fresh vibrant vibe, otherwise missing in Indian web serials about urban couples.

Unhappy marriages are never entertaining to watch unless the writing is peppered with precocity and perspicuity. Mind The Malhotras gets there, though sometimes not fast enough. The writing tends to slump in parts. I especially found the subplot about the Malhotras’ househelp Zorru (that’s Zorawar for you) finding himself a bride. The interludes about Zorru raving and his joru (wife) lack a grip. This is a case of a subplot trying too hard to be cute.

On the other hand, the subplot regarding Sushmita Mukherjee and Dalip Tahil kindling an autumnal affair is quite amusing, especially since Sushmita’s daughter-in-law Shefali knows what her son Rishabh doesn’t.

There is also the chance that Shefali and Rishabh’s younger daughter may be a lesbian. Okay, I know: bringing in both a homosexual and a lesbian angle in the same season may seem like bit of a clutter.

Mind The Malhotras never becomes an oppressive watch. It is light in tone and always genial and witty. While Cyrus Sahukar and Mini Mathur are pitch perfect (she is sometimes, bitch perfect) Sahil Sangha’s direction is never keen to open too many windows and doors. The tone remains purposely unflappable.

Although Rishabh and Shefali are secretly seeing the same shrink (Denzil Smith) they are never quite as amusing and revealing as Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep seeing therapist Steve Carell in Hope Springs. Mind The Malhotras is not that ambitious. But it is an invigorating amusing plunge into a broken marriage.

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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