The Mehta Boys , Boman Irani Explodes On  Screen In His Directorial  Debut On  Amazon

Rating: ****

 I was amused and exasperated  to wake up  to see a review claiming that   a ‘brilliant’ Avinash Tiwari  ‘outshines’ Boman Irani   in The  Mehta  Boys (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video).

Firstly, this is  quite untrue,  and secondly  this is  not a kabaddi match. But a delicately  poised   father-son mellow drama,where any effort by the two principal  actors to  outshine each other would have landed  the film flat on its face.

   Irani and Tiwari as father and son Shiv and  Amay playing a  hostile pair on screen are  fulsomely aligned as  actors, so much so  that I wondered how much they must have worked  towards achieving this  level of compatibility  on  screen.

     Boman Irani’s first  stab at  direction stabs you  in the heart. The father-son conflict is  as old as  Ramesh  Sippy’s Shakti , and as recent as  Parambrata Chatterjee’s  Ie Raat Tomar Amar.  Irani, who has cowritten this  strong screenplay with  Alexander Dinelaris  on  a fragile relationship,  doesn’t allow  the central relationship to  slip  out of his control; nor does he ignore  the secondary characters: Amay’s sister Anu(Puja Sarup) and  girlfriend  Zara(Shreya Choudhary) are  both elegantly encrypted into  the plot.

 The vivid sequences have an episodic feel to them: Amay’s mother  dies, sister  decides to take her father with her to the US, Amay must spend a weekend with his father on account of  a missed flight, etc…The  flow of life and the throb  of emotions that  defines each of us through  our  relationships, define Boman Irani’s  structural  edifice.

  The  Mehta Boys has a live-in  feel to it, and  yet  we feel there is something happening here that we haven’t seen before. It is interesting  how Irani  weaves the father-son conflict  into an architectural theme without  over-metaphorizing the  narration.  There is a simplicity  in the storytelling  underlined by a subliminal  tension which keeps us invested  in the core-relationship  till the  end. Although we kind of know how it will pan out finally we  remain  curious  about  how Irani intends to get  there.

   Some first-timer self indulgences—for example,  the ongoing leitmotif  of  Shiv ‘seeing’ his dead wife , or father and son bonding over Chaplin—could have been avoided.

 For those of us  who always believed that  an actor turning  director should stay behind the camera, here is ample  evidence to the contrary. The impressively gifted actor  Boman Irani makes an assured  sensitive directorial  debut.There is sufficient emotional  heft and storytelling craft in  The  Mehta  Boys to qualify it as  one  of  the best  films of this  year. It is not without its flaws.What is life without  them?!