Modern Love Mumbai Review: A layered, hopeful & brilliant anthology with heartfelt performances

Modern Love Mumbai brings six stories from noted filmmakers and writers of the country. Read our review of the anthology here.

By Priyakshi Sharma

Updated on May 18, 2022 | 09:45 AM IST | 301K

Modern Love Mumbai Review: A layered, hopeful & brilliant anthology with heartfelt performances (Image: Amazon Prime Video Instagram)

Modern Love Mumbai

Directors: Alankrita Shrivastava, Hansal Mehta, Dhruv Sehgal, Shonali Bose, Vishal Bhardwaj, Nupur Asthana

Cast: Sarika, Danesh Razvi, Pratik Gandhi, Ranveer Brar, Tanuja, Masaba Gupta, Ritwik Bhowmik, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Meiyang Chang, Naseeruddin Shah, Yeo Yann Yann, Wamiqa Gabbi, Chitrangda Singh, Arshad Warsi & others

Streaming on: Prime Video

Rating: 4/5

Mumbai has always been a muse for the desi heart. Artists, writers, filmmakers, and photographers, have tried to capture the pulse of the city time and again in their creative pursuits. While those who live there must know its gullies, flyovers, and traffic like the back of their hands, those who are from other towns and cities, must have developed a fairly good idea about it from films too.

So, what new would six filmmakers possibly bring to the table, to the streaming medium, to be precise, when adapting and writing stories about love and Mumbai, I thought, as I sat down to watch Modern Love Mumbai, the six-part localized anthology adapted from essays from the New York Times’ Modern Love column, and produced by Pritish Nandy. And boy, was I surprised by the novelty it had to offer.

Alankrita Shrivastava, Hansal Mehta, Dhruv Sehgal, Shonali Bose, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Nupur Asthana come together to bring about six different human stories connected mainly by two overbearing themes: Love and Mumbai. Each episode is around 40 minutes long, and takes us on an exciting journey of the six protagonists introduced to us. Each story is a short movie, that could easily be stretched to a 90-minute-long feature film.

The title track of the series ‘Mausam’ crooned by Nikhil D’Souza, accompanies a fast-moving slide show of pictures of real people – of creators, writers, and directors associated with the anthology. Blink, and you miss either a credit, or a picture. But it suits its theme perfectly – after all, Mumbai does not have a second to spare.

In all six stories, one element remains constant, and that’s Mumbai. The city is definitely the most layered character in the series. With every story, Mumbai opens her arms wider and wider, to allow every kind of love inside it, defying all norms of age, race, gender. Kudos to the directors and DOPs for taking the global audience on a journey to undiscovered, quaint, and lesser-captured corners of the metropolitan city.

Alankrita Shrivastava’s story is titled ‘My Beautiful Wrinkles’ and it features Sarika and Danesh Razvi. Shrivastava, who earlier directed Lipstick Under My Burkha, has quite the eye to tell nuanced women’s stories. Through a little-over middle-aged Dilbar Sodhi (Sarika) and a young Kunal Shah (Danesh), Alankrita captures the fears and battles of growing old, alone. In her story, love is about seeing yourself from the eyes of another, thus enabling self-acceptance.

Hansal Mehta’s story titled ‘Baai’ features Pratik Gandhi, Ranveer Brar, and veteran actress Tanuja, and is a tribute to love’s victories over hatred and ignorance of all kinds. Pratik is brilliant, and Ranveer is a discovery! Mehta’s story makes the most use of music out of all six films. From Ali Sethi’s soulful track Chandi Raat which talks about the beauty of union after separation, to Sonu Nigam’s Kaise Baaten Karto Ho, to Lakhon Ke Bol by Rutiya Lad, the music lends itself to the narrative effortlessly.

Dhruv Sehgal excels at creating and writing mundane, everyday stories for celluloid. Thirty-something Saiba (Masaba Gupta) and Parth (Ritwik Bhowmik’s) stories truly tug at your heartstrings. It’s also one of the most ‘modern’ stories in the anthology, if we go by the most standard definition of the word. For, Dhruv explores how exhausting and lonely finding ‘the’ person can get, especially in the day and age of dating apps. Like his previous outing Little Things, in “I Love Thane’ too, Sehgal drops gems, wrapped in simple articulation of mundane observations that have crossed everyone’s minds at some point or the other.

Next, we have, one of my favorite stories on the list, “Raat Rani” by Shonali Bose. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that Fatima Sana Shaikh has delivered her career-best performance. Her Kashmiri dialect and accent are commendable, and largely contribute to making her character Lalzari so instantly likeable. After a 10-year-long marriage unprecedently comes to a halt, Lali reclaims her love for self, as she conquers a flyover with an old bicycle. This is one story that made me laugh and sob at the same time. Yet again, Shonali Bose has coloured her sky with fragile yet powerful love.

Next up, we have Vishal Bhardwaj’s ‘Mumbai Dragon’ that says a lot in little time. From the love between a mother and son, to casual racism at work, Meiyang Chang, Yeo Yann Yann, Naseeruddin Shah, and Wamiqa Gabbi’s story has it all. Bhardwaj’s story explores, how, sometimes, love is about the balance between letting go, and holding on, lest it becomes suffocating.

The last story is titled ‘Cutting Chai’ and features Arshad Warsi and Chitrangda Singh in the lead. Directed by Nupur Asthana, it’s the most experimental in its choice of narrative style. The film dabbles into the life of an ‘almost’ author who wonders about the endless possibilities of how her life would have turned out had she decided differently. Both Arshad and Chitrangda are in their elements and light up the screen with their chemistry as Latika and Danny, who have been married for almost two decades.

Diverse stories are at play, with each character so different from one another. What makes Modern Love Mumbai ‘modern’, you might wonder? Well, it’s in how each story is adapted with mindfulness about how difficult and challenging life can be, in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai. And then, countering it with a kind of human connection, empathy, acceptance, and embrace, that only Mumbai is capable of offering.