Modern Love, for those of you who do not know, is a hallowed column run by the New York Times that has already been adapted by Amazon Prime Video. The Indian adaptation begins with a disclaimer that these are in fact stories inspired by articles from the same column. Which kind of makes you wonder what lack of inspiration or source material pushed Amazon’s Indian arm into importing these stories rather than seeking or writing its own. Modern Love: Mumbai is an anthology of six stories, set in the distinctly unromantic city of Mumbai. While about love and the modern interpretation of relationships, the series is also strangely inert and for an anthology about love, suffers from a sincere deficit of whimsy and faith.
Of the six stories, only two make a somewhat lasting impression. Shonali Bose’s Raat Raani about an abandoned Kashmiri migrant Lali, is an endearing if convenient ode to self-love. Whereas Vishal Bhardwaj’s Mumbai Dragon is a quirky, disarming tale about the tensions of familial relationships driven by insecurity. Perhaps it was always going to be a race against logic, trying to localise stories that haven’t originated in India. The international adaption itself was a trite, ‘filmy’ adaptation of a column that is otherwise based on sobering yet warm actual stories. It kind of raises questions about love and its many versions on and off the screen.
The biggest let-down in this anthology is the schematic employment of ideas that sound more like social-media inspired tropes than actual lived experiences. Hansal Mehta’s Baai, for example, wants to talk about gay love but its uninspired use of idioms like “the secret ingredient is love” feels dated and frankly, unimaginative. Dhruv Sehgal’s I Love Thane is the most conversational and though it is the only story that manages to feel lived-in, it forgets to illustrate anything close to emotion through the vaguely restrained performances of its protagonists. Nupur Asthana’s Cutting Chai is banal, its tensions so insincere and dubious it is hard to care for its non-conflicts. Alankrita Shrivastava’s My Beautiful Wrinkles is by far the weakest, unmoving 40 minutes of cinema where the bar of performance set by the remains of an automobile is rarely surpassed by the humans walking around in the story.
Modern Love Mumbai’s interpretation of love is certainly millennial, for it arrives at catharsis from different directions. Sometimes it is through the stamp of approval, the coming together of distant souls or in the idea of carrying on without the burdens of longing for companionship. The ideas sound universal, but in this adaption they are so awkwardly thread that a ball of yarn feels like a lifeless mesh of fatal entanglements. This is of course in an industry that has for decades built itself up on the idea of romantic love, of familial obligations. While it is okay to accost the industry’s institutional baggage through progressive ideas, it makes for a hammy, almost journalistic portrayal of love that feels, for the lack of a better word, dull. Maybe Bollywood was in fact onto something in all those years, for this abandonment of rationale for the sake of a couple of hours, at least, felt transformative even if deceptive in turns.
Our cinema is maturing, sure, but in this race to modernise rid itself of wonder, is it starting to echo the banality of life? I approached Modern Love Mumbai with the hope that at least one story would be all ballast about the dreamy aspects of Mumbai, the city that many a love letter has been written for. Instead, the city is redundant in these stories, which makes you question its curation along geographies. Furthermore, the entire series feels stiff, as if rationalised to within an inch of dreary realism. That wouldn’t be a problem if these stories weren’t also codified by tired tropes in a last-ditch attempt to ignite something. It’s almost as if the makers believe that detailing surpasses the emotional wattage of what happens onscreen. To which effect, Modern Love Mumbai feels like a Humans of Bombay page striving to come alive on the screen, confused between the possibilities of cinema and limitations of lived realities that these stories are born out of.
Often anthologies are rescued by standout performances, but in this forgetful adaptation there are few to name, except maybe Fatima Sana Sheikh who seems to have benefited simply, from being assigned a role that requires her to break the vague tempered authority of a world that is also trying to convince us there is love in it. Frankly, I’d see the excessive version that Bollywood has offered us over the years, because at least there, you are guaranteed whimsy, romance, lust and often something magical. Here it is just a cascade of truisms that weigh down upon you even in moments of genuine sexual and emotional tension. Even the sex – rare here - feels awkward, and not in the way that humans are possibly doing it, but in the way that it feels alien, unlike anything you have witnessed or experienced yourself. It’s one of the many things that makes Modern Love Mumbai unwieldy, maybe even unlikeable.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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