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Amazon’s Modern Love Is Well Worth Investing In
Modern Love :Mumbai (Amazon Prime Video, 6 films directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, Hansal Mehta,Nupur Asthana, Vishal Bharadwaj, Dhruv Sehgal, Shonali Bose)
Rating: ****
Three of the six films—we can’t call them episodes as they are all self contained independent narratives—are absolute winners. The stand-out films here are clearly Hansal Mehta’s Baai, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Mumbai Dragon and Shonali Bose’s Raat Rani, the last being especial for Fatima Sana Shaikh’s rousing performance,but more on that later.
Hansal Mehta’s Baai features Pratik Gandhi as the scion of a conservative Muslim family struggling in the closet. Rich in ambience, and brimming with romance music and elegance Baai is a classic representation of what can be done in the OTT space if a filmmaker has his heart set on it.While Pratik and debutant Ranveer Brar are splendidly paired as lovers, Baai brims over with wonderful actors in even the smallest part; for example look out for young Dhaval Thakur in one sequence where he steals a kiss with Pratik on the stairs.And such a delight to see the great Tanuja as the family patriarch saying a line like, “Main toh paydayashi khubsoorat hoon,” with such casual elan.
Vishal Bharadwaj’s Mumbai Dragon is the director’s best work in ages.Warm and witty, wise and thoughtprovoking, it takes the age-old struggle between Mother and Beloved over the man in their life into the North East and turns the conflict into tragic-comic comment on racial segregation and cultural assimilation. The beautifully shot short-film with long legs, boasts of a fabulous central performance by Chinese actress Yeo Yann Yann as the ferociously possessive mother smothering her son with food food and more food.Naseeruddin Shah puts in a gamely cameo as the family’s Sikh friend.
As for Shonali Bose’s Raat Rani , what do I say about Fatima Sana Shaikh’s performance as a super-spirited Kashmiri woman suddenly deserted by her husband? We can see Fatima’s layered character Lalzari picking up the pieces of her broken life and stringing together an all-new narrative for herself, as she learns to control her peddling on the rickety bicycle negotiating her way through the no-entry zones of life. Fatima’s efforts to get into the skin of the character, and that includes a lot of physical labour, pays rich dividends. Shonali Bose’s beautiful film on starting again comes to vivid life.
The other three stories are not quite in the same league as the triumphant triumvirate. Dhruv Sehgal’s I Love Thane is the best of the inferior threesome. Masaba Gupta is impressively in character as a not-so-young woman trying to find companionship in a staid decent boy from Thane.Segal’s film would have benefited from better pacing. The storytelling is sluggish at times.
Alankrita Shrivastava’s I Love My Wrinkles is a disappointment , coming as it does from the director of Bombay Begums and Lipstick On The Burqa. Sarika plays a widowed 60-plus woman who invites a young jogger(Danesh Razvi) from the street below into her home for coffee. One things leads to another….there is nothing here to grab our attention beyond the done-to-death ‘Mrs Robinson’ syndrome.The Kitty party sequences look familiar as though we’ve been there…
Finally the weakest film of the anthology is Nupur Asthana’s Cutting Chai. Chitrangda Singh plays a woman who has neglected her career long enough for husband Arshad Warsi who says trite things like, ‘Life is as simple or complicated as you make it’. Now the wife wants to bounce back. The storytelling is selfconsciously fey, with commuters at the railway station suddenly turning into chorus dancers. Quite suddenly , the wonderful Mita Vashisht shows up whispering to Chitrangada, “You have it in you.”
Wish we could say the same about Nupur Asthana’s film. On the whole, Modern Love is light to the touch,and lovely to watch. The image of Fatima Sana Shaikh cycling on a flyover with not a care in the world, lingers.
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The Romantics Adi Chopra’s Show All The Way

Netflix’s The Romantics profiling the legend Yash Chopra in four episodes , happened only because Netflix gave complete creative control to Yash Chopra’s son Aditya Chopra, the scion of the Yash Raj family.
A source very close to the project reveals, “If it wasn’t for Adi’s nod, the project wouldn’t have happened. He not only greenlighted the project, he also personally supervised every aspect of the project. Smriti Mundhra is on board as the director of The Romantics. But it is Adi who decided what goes, and what not.”
Apparently the thirty-five interviewees speaking on Yash Chopra in The Romantics were all personally approved by Adi Chopra who also agreed to do his first video interview ever for the docu-pic on his distinguished dad.
Adi Chopra’s one and only print interview was with film critic/editor Khalid Mohamed.
The Romantics starts streaming on Netflix on Valentine’s Day February 14.
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Chhatriwali So Earnest Yet So Awful

Chhatriwali(Zee5)
Rating: **
There are some films which one can’t wait to see the end of. Chhatriwali is a prime contender for the most dreary dreadful and dull film of the year. I know, the year has just begun and I am sure there are several more slumberous celluloid atrocities waiting to inveigle our senses before we can say, ‘Akhanda’.
But seriously, Chhatriwala is a pill hard to swallow. Or perhaps considering the theme, a protection hard to trust . Like one of those leaky condoms that Rakul Preet Singh and Satish kaushik giggle over, Chhatriwala is like an umbrella with so many holes that you stop counting after a while and just run for protection from the pouring rain.
There are some good actors here, like poor Rakesh Bedi. I can’t remember when was the last time he played something better than a buffoon. In this film he comes and goes as a matchmaking Chacha and pharmacist who frowns at anyone who asks for condoms. It’s like the Bihar police arresting a Russian citizen for an ampoule of vodka.
Satish Kaushik as condom-factory owner is given a hideous wig , probably as protection against the people of Karnal attacking him for…a) selling something as evil as condoms , b) being in a film so terrible that one forgives Raza Murad for doing Kanti Shah’s films.
The very talented Rajesh Tailang is the eldest son in a conservative family who refuses to wear protection although his wife has had multiple miscarriages and abortions.
“You must persuade your husband to practise safe sex.” The gynaecologist counsels Prachee Shah Pandya who ties a cloth around her forehead throughout the film to control a perpetual headache.
I tried the same while watching the film. It didn’t work.
What exactly is the purpose of this film? Beyond telling the public that condoms are not evil.Surely there could be a more entertaining, less painful way of putting the message across. The film is also about dignity of a labour. Even a woman can work in a condom factory without blushing.
Sanya Dhingra takes a long time to reveal her job profile to her husband played by Sumeet Vyas who looks so lost he could be a potential patron for Pathaan who strayed into a shooting location while searching for a tout selling tickets.
The film seems to have been written to highlight for Rakul Preet Singh’s cosmetic collection. Even when she is in the kitchen pretending to fry pakodas she looks drip-dried and dewy. She throws her lines about safe sex at the other characters as though rehearsing for a school play on sex education.
There is a standing joke about Sanya riding pillion daily into the factory next to her workplace so that her husband doesn’t get to know what she does for a living. She befriends a watchman who becomes her ally in a situation that he doesn’t understand.It is the only time we get to smile in this tedious humourless comedy .
I don’t see the sale of condoms going up after this film. But I do see the tourism in Karnal going down.Who would want to spend his holiday in a town filled with such boring people?
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Trial By Fire: It Makes You Think Hard About Your Priorities

Trial By Fire(Netflix,7 Episodes)
Directed by Prashant Nair, Randeep Jha, Avani Nair
Rating: ****
This is not a series. It is a piece of history regurgitated into a meticulously re-designed eyewitness account of what happened on 13 June 1997 when Delhi’s Uphaar cinema went up in flames extinguishing the joy and wellbeing of several families who lost their near and dear ones in the tragedy.
This series recreates the long and endless legal battle of a couple Shekhar and Neelam Krishnamoorthy who lost both children in the Uphaar cinema fire while watching J P Dutta’s Border.
The battle is long . But the couple’s patience, especially Neelam’s , is unlimited. This is the story of resilience determination and obstinacy , so real so tangible you can feel the pain of the couple every step along their painful battle.It won’t be wrong to say the couple fought their own war as fiercely as the soldiers seen in Border.
Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol are pitch-perfect. The series creates a credible ambience around the couple. The time leaps for eighteen years(yes, that’s how long the Krishnamoorthy’s legal battle has gone on) are achieved with the least amount of fuss. Blessedly we don’t hear songs from every phase in the couple’s legal battle playing in the background.
But yes, the anthemic song from J P Dutta’s Border does play a vital part in the articulate sound design…Or maybe ‘design’ is not the word I am looking for. Nothing in this series seems designed. There is flow of inevitability about the proceedings. Of course this is all preordained since it is a scrupulous recreation of actual facts. But the series never feels it is indebted to facts. Rather, facts flow freely and fluently into storytelling.
Even the fictional moments(like the electrician Veer Singh played Rajesh Tailang and his wife Sarla, played by Kiran Sharma, having frantic sex after he returns home from prison, or a gay couple holding hands at the catastrophic first-day screening of Border) seem to be intimately interwoven into the plot.
On the minus side: too many characters which are either ill-formed or dangerously sidestepped . Neelam and Shekhar’s neighbour played by Shilpa Shukla is around for no particular reason. Anupam Kher and Ratna Pathak Shah as a retired army officer and his wife struggle to make their presence felt.
Many capable actors like Ashish Vidyarthi, Nimisha Nair, Shardul Bhardwaj, and Siddharth Bhardwaj try hard to justify their presence in the plot. But this is really not about them. It is about the Krishnamoorthys , and Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol are as credible as any two capable actors can get given the tragic circumstances.
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Something Not To Be Missed On Zee5

The Final Call(Zee5) :Arjun Rampal has an inscrutable face. It is the face of man who doesn’t reveal much. In “The Final Call”, he plays Karan Sachdeva, a pilot with many secrets all ruinous and devastating. As all of them come undone layer by layer in the cockpit of an airborne flight to Australia, we know the passengers on board are doomed.
And yet, here lies the formula to a whacking screen saga. You know. Yet you hold your breath. The writing in this 4-part series is clearly of that caliber. We know. Yet we sit riveted. Right at the start we meet an astrologer-scholar Krishnamurthy, played with wonderfully whittled wisdom by Neeraj Kabi who takes that ill-fated flight because his kundali says that’s where his end is destined. Krishnamurthy’s family rightly advises him to just stay away from the destined.
But Krishnamurthy “how I love his transcendental wisdom” has other ideas. Kabi gives a fatalistic spin to the proceedings, wrapping his character’s prophecies in a surge of immediacy. His interaction on board the doomed flight with a jaded tycoon (Javed Jaffrey, who plays it cool, as only he can) has us reading between the lines, looking for valuable clues to something beyond what is happening in the plot.
The truth about The Final Call is that it does things which we normally don’t see happening on the big screen. It opens up the characters’ inner world to reveal the dark interiors. The view is frightening and funny, as only a story told in leisure can be.I came away deeply riveted by this impressive adaptation of Priya Kumar’s bestseller I Will Go With You: The Flight Of Lifetime. The characters, whether it was the Australian girl rushing back home to surprise her cheating boyfriend, or her co-passenger in the next seat, a cocky 18-year old trying to hit on her. Everyone left a lingering impression. There are no cardboard characters on board this flight. Rest assured. And don’t forget to fasten your seatbelt.
But my favourite in the series besides Arjun Rampal, is Sakshi Tanwar playing a pregnant terror negotiator. There is a sequence where she leaves home for work promising her worried husband that she won’t do anything dangerous, then returns in the evening fatigued while he watches her on television dealing with a dreaded terrorist in a hostage situation. Sakshi builds a case for women taking on patriarchal jobs and beating the hell out of the cynical competition.
The plot is relentlessly robust unveiling unfurling thoughts and looping action faster than we can process their relevance. With performances that solidly anchor the action, the first four episodes have me waiting for the next season.
Shirin Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi(Zee5): While watching Bela Sehgal’s sweet tender story of Shrin and Farhad passed the age of marriage, determined to find love and companionship in each other’s unexciting company one immediately thought of Basu Chatterjee’s Khatta Meetha and Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee. The first, because it was a film about a widow and a widower from the Parsi community overcoming their children’s opposition for an autumnal marriage.
Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee was remarkably accurate in portraying the benign quirks of the Parsi community. So is Bela Bhansali Sehgal. Though not a Parsi herself she plunges into the centre of the dwindling community’s eccentricities without trying to give the characters any kind of a novel existence beyond what they are stereotypically known for.
The love story of Shirin (Farah Khan) and Farhad (Boman Irani, as natural as ever) holds no surprises. They meet, they smirk, they walk hand-in-hand… he mistakes her invitation for coffee in her home for suggestion for sex. While she makes he coffee, he waits for her undressed, and… you know the rest.The portrayal of Farhad’s mother (Daisy Irani) and grandmother (Shammi) reveals the film’s writer Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s penchant for loud extroverted singing, dancing, chortling aging woman characters, e.g Helen in Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical and Kirron Kher in Devdas.
Beneath all the feminine giggles (bras and panties, hee hee) and male guffaws (“tera rocket kab phutega”?) that surround the theme of courtship between a middle-aged couple for whom life is neither a picnic nor a funeral, director Bela Bhansali Sehgal seeks out silent passages of undulating sensitivity.Listen carefully. The film makes terrific use of silent moments that are becoming progressively rare in our cinema.
Sehgal has cast true-blue Parsi actors in all the roles, big and small. In fact I could hardly spot any non-Parsi in the cast!
The comic vein tends to get unwieldy at times, as if the attempt to be funny has taken a toll on the characters’ sense of self-identity. We get a Parsi wacko (Kurush Deboo) who runs amok with an antique gun threatening to kill anyone who comes in his way. He does’t make much sense in the scheme of the plot. But then, what makes sense in life other than the senselessness that we see see all around us?
Bela Bhansali doesn’t try to make sense of the chaos. She flows with the chaos seeking laughter in the eccentricity. Hence when an old Parsi gentleman constantly writes love notes to Indira Gandhi you know he has lost it. And you smile, because eccentricity is a pre-condition in a rom-com about two over-the-hill Parsis, one of whom sells lingerie and meets the woman of his dreams when she comes to buy a brassiere.
Laughter designed on inner-wear can never fail.Luckily the film goes beyond inner-wear and seeks a place in heart. The director emerges with some truly heartwarming moments between Boman and Farah. Unki love story to nikal padi. The debutante director has carved an endearing relationship between the unlikely couple. The romance is embellished with charming little incidents that add beautifully to the pacy perky pastiche of Parsi proceedings.
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