Language: Hindi
In a scene from Netflix’s Mai, Sheel played by a watered-down Sakshi Tanwar rummages a junkyard for a lost object she expects to barter for a clue about her daughter’s mysterious accident-turned-murder. A garbage bag she tears into reveals, suddenly, a child’s hand. “Ladki hogi, yahan bohat milenge aise,” an accomplice assures her rather nonchalantly. Mai, as she is referred to in the series, casually unfurls a scarf she has been using to keep the stench of garbage out, to cover the wretched sight. It’s a stunning sequence, tied together by the fragility of a mother and the cruel abyss she must stare into to find worse truths about her late daughter. It’s perhaps a metaphor for this country, captured through a moment so casually ushered into the narrative it perfectly illustrates both Mai’s brilliance, and its weaknesses. For it is a show that successfully communicates the savagery of its world through moments, but fails to carve something memorable as a whole.
Not a lot in Mai in terms of the premise is of course novel. A mother out to avenge her lost daughter is a done-to-death format but in Mai the mechanics of a ghastly world contribute to making the series more than the sum of its linear aspirations. After her daughter is run over by a truck in front of her eyes, chance coincidences force Sheel to almost dead-walk through a self-sustained investigation. Twists, accidents, last-minute escapes and violence follow but they are delivered with the restraint of cold steel sporting the summer sun. It’s seamless, without antics that would qualify as rudimentary acting. It is what perpetuates tension in a show that communicates violence not always by lifting the hand or clattering one thing into the other but also through a bead of sweat, the glance of desperation or Tanwar’s implied innocence.
Cast against type, Tanwar delivers a nuanced performance as an understated mother who, masterfully hidden from the viewer’s eye, graduates from victim to soldier.
To think that the bahu of Indian Soap’s golden era could inhabit a world so far removed from her own past work is evidence of directorial control and performances actors can deliver when serviced with the right material. Speaking of which, Raima Sen pulls in a notable performance from the annals of non-existence with an inspired turn as the surviving widow of a mafia don (Prashant Narayanan who we really deserve more of). You can gauge from these names alone that the cast is intuitively put together and surprisingly, thanks to the creative control, delivers performances that stick their landing pretty much across the board.
There is a hint of Pataal Lok’s brutality to Mai (Sudip Sharma is a producer on the series) and the nihilistic world that the story is set in gives offers new hurdles, more political than personal at times, to solve. Devashish Makhija’s Ajji was a more unsubtle recreation of the revenge drama, whereas Mai though violent, has a sense of poetic fatalism about many of its moving parts. That said our view into the personal lives of Mai’s characters is limited with the exception understandably of Sheel. Naturally, Tanwar must shoulder a lot of what happens in the show, which she just about manages. Noire-sque dramas, even the ones that transport you to hell and back, hinge on the presence of lives that feel as epic as they seem mythologically sourced. Though the series tries to give Tanwar enough skin it underwrites other, equally interesting characters which is rather unfortunate because they are begging in this particular milieu, to be explored.
Certain true crime shows in the modern OTT era hang onto their central mysteries for dear life. Others believe that the drama of the journey dwarfs the rewards of the convenient mystery at its heart. Mai believes in the strengths of its dramatic tension but it really undercuts its own potential by failing to layer a number of its peripheral, but interesting characters. Ultimately, there is too much for the protagonist to shoulder, too many moving pieces without enough history or insight driving them forward. The moody, rotten world that the series is etched in weighs on you, its burdens empowering the tension that never exits the screen, but despite the earnest performances there isn’t enough meat to pull off the dramatic heights that the series is trying to build.
The direction and Tanwar’s towering performance are admirable for their focus and pace, with some terrific moments carved out of the violence of everyday life but eventually, Mai falls a little short of being remarkable or even memorable. It’s an also-ran show that can be admired for sticking to its own voice, sustaining a dreary worldview and not for a moment looking the part that it technically aspires to. Emotionally, though, it misses the woods for the trees.
Mai is streaming on Netflix.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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