Some things never change. Pritam and his fellow musicians are still singing and playing on rooftops of skyscrapers, while down below, the world goes on with its rituals of cute courtship and unnecessary breakups. Obviously inspired by the mother of all segmented cinema Love Actually, Anurag Basu tells an uneven but finally satisfying saga of four couples in fractured, incomplete relationships, trying to find a middleground between a compromised relationship and a breakup.
Some of it, especially the track featuring Ali Fazal as a struggling musician and Fatima Sana Sheikh as his insanely patient pregnant girlfriend, work. Others don’t. C’est la vie! What works wonderfully for me—though I doubt it will connect with the average viewer—is the musical format. The choreography of some of the musical pieces is exceptional, especially one performance in a pub where couples sing about how they first met. It’s been a while since we saw so much music flow out of film so smoothly.
I wish writer-director Anurag Basu desisted from going overboard with the relationship issues. Some of it borders on burlesque. The Konkona Sen–Pankaj Tripathi episode starts off on a mildly amusing note, and then plunges progressively into the preposterous. Not even the two dependable actors can prevent their onscreen equation from cancelling itself out.
Some of Konkona’s vengeful manoeuvres in the second half (including encouraging a younger man to hop into her bed) smacks of sexism in reverse. Why is it a moral crime for the man to stray in a marriage, while a woman in the same situation is humoured and pampered? Worse still is the Anupam Kher–Neena Gupta episode which begins on an empathetic note for the housewife with her lost dreams (reminded me of Ratna Pathak Shah in Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad). Neena Gupta’s wanton-woman play-acting to help Kher in his domestic crisis is not only lame, but also makes us question Anurag Basu’s actual understanding of urban metropolitan relationships.
His grip over the grammar of the theme was far stronger in the first film that came eighteen years ago, or even in Ludo a few years ago. Here he is often on shaky ground. Some of the intended humour never lands favourably. Aditya Roy Kapur and Sara Ali Khan’s coupled overacting would have worked better as stand-up comedy. They are constantly sparring as if afraid that if they stop their banter the writer would write them out of the plot.
I wish Anurag Basu had exercised more austerity in his storytelling. It would have perhaps prevented some of the characters from looking so full of themselves. The ones that really work are Ali Fazal and Fatima Sana Sheikh whose problems seem real and solvable. The others seem to be faking it most of the time. They just don’t feel right.
And what’s with the young teen who can’t decide whether she likes boys or girls? Why does she need to know this so early in her life? In the effort to cover the entire spectrum of human relationships from early teens to the autumnal years, Metro In Dino goes uncontrollably overboard. Nonetheless, it is a work worth a watch for its interweavement of music and drama, albeit in an infirm clasp.
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