Call Me Bae Is  A Kaleidoscope  Of  Fun ,Frolic  & Message On Woke Womanhood

Collin D’Cunha  surely has what it takes.  Call Me Bae, which is streaming on Amazon Prime  from September  6, is no ordinary happening.It is monstrously entertaining and insanely binge-worthy.What’s more,  it doesn’t make any concerted  effort to seduce us into its  storytelling.

It doesn’t need  to.It  breaks all the rudimentary  rules  of the streaming  business  with content that is unapologetically  formulistic  and   emphatically entertaining. The series  is at once a jolt to the  norm  and a  visit to  La La Land.

Every character is  real yet  fairytale-like. Good  looks  are  prerequisite . But no   one here is an  airhead. The  protagonist discusses Naipaul with as  much authority as Gucci.The  idea is to  tease  audiences  with  a high dose of the  don’t-we-know-this-character aphrodisiac.

Vir Das  is  especially  a  scream as a selfobsessed  news journalist who  shouts his  way into nightly  attention through the  TRPs. The rest of the cast too, particularly  Gurfateh Pirzada, Varun Sood, Vihaan Samat, Muskkaan Jaferi, Niharika Lyra Dutt, Lisa Mishra are borderline brilliant,bringing to  the  broad-mouthed fish-bowl canvas a   freshness and  charm in equal proportions. These are  actors who know the world they are inhabiting and  go about imbuing their character with a nod of  familiarity and  a comfort of the known, without being smug or over-selfassured.

The  screenplay( Ishita Moitra, Samina Motlekar and Rohit Nair) gives  the protagonist Bella/Bae  a wide arc. Ananya Pandey goes  from disgraced  trophy wife to celebrated MeToo champion  with a  poise and flourish which belie  her bimboesque  image. Call Me Bae is her  calling card to  a kind of stardom that  most of her  critics had never  anticipated.

 Unlike other chick flicks, the actors who play Bae’s  spouse/admirers, ex-es  are not  reduced to  shadow play. Each man and  woman  one is  an individual, helping the hurting healing   but happy Bae to find her groove. While  she does, the narrative springs  a  series of amiable episodes filled with vigour and vim, replete with  a respiratory rhythm that  resonates with the dreams  and desires  of   privileged youngsters who may not have  to worry  about where  their next Jimmy Choo is coming from. But they  have their own struggles to  fret over.

Call Me Bae is  the  kind of zany yet ruminative  entertainment that we haven’t seen  on the  streaming  platform since Sacred Games.