CAST:Sakshi Tanwar, Vivek Mushran, Wamiqa Gabbi, Raima Sen, Prashant Narayanan, Ankur Ratan, Anant Vidhaat, Vaibhav Raj Gupta, Seema Pahwa
DIRECTED BY: Anshai Lal, Atul Mongia
BLUF: A grieving mother discovers the criminals behind her daughter’s tragic death, and transforms from meek to merciless to get the real story. Sakshi Tanwar’s journey from a timid housewife to a woman with steel is at the heart of ‘Mai’
Mai is in a Lucknow which seems very far away from the culture of the city that we have seen it to be on celluloid. Through most of the series, we felt like shaking the sanskari woman veneer and the mind numbingly illogical plot of how she goes about avening her daughters death.
In the middle of ruthless mobsters, financial scams, political power and the family divide; Sakshi Tanwar’s Sheel is not a well rounded character.
Add to that some lazy character arcs of other surrounding cast, we see an ideograph like none other. For a story that could have been pulsating with action, pace and extreme thrill, it turns out a damb squib only to be supported by unrelenting imagery of a no make-up mother who wants to figure out which killer planned her daughter’s murder and why.
The entire premise based on which she assumes that her daughter was murdered and not accidently killed itself was so filmsy that the writers Mongia, Tamal Sen, Amita Vyas had coax us along to other wild sub-plots. It takes a saint to refrain from swinging out the What thes.
Sheel is a woman who divides her time between her family and the sleepy inmates of an old age home and quite suddenly she becomes equipped to hoodwink career cops, real big baddies who have been smarter than the cops for years, a dodgy businessman (Prashant Narayanan), a hard-eyed sex worker turned gangster (Raima Sen), perform league of the legends and turn up with her soft voice and mannerisms to spoil their game. This is what she does while she is being a cow at home while her husband, and his elder brother have literally taken her rights as a mother and decided without her consent to give up in adoption their son to the older brother.
Crap. yes. She didn’t stand up to her family and stop them from infringing on her own rights as a mother with an opinion, whereas she is single handedly bringing down an entire mafia setup which even the Special Task Force of Lucknow police, including a hot cop ( Ankur Ratan) couldn’t- riding a scootie in her sari.
Sheel’s husband (Vivek Mushran, still good looking after all this gap), a man who appears to have resigned to his misfortune, running a chemist shop as his day job, doing odd repair jobs in peoples homes at night. We never get the full character arc of this soul. Who is he? Why is he so beholden to his brother – even though he respects his wife and cares for her- why would he give their son away in adoption without consulting her?We do not get those answers.
Wamiqa Gabbi does a great job as the doctor child who is speech impaired and tries to communicate, yet fails to.
We dont ever get to know why and how she gets embroiled in the medical scam and what exactly that was.
The bhabhi – bhaisahab dynamic is cringy yet symbolic of how economic status between the two brothers determines the relationship between all the family members. In between the goon politics and the explicitives,in a la-mirzapur style – the entire scenario is quite unbelievable from a logical perspective.
Wish Seema Pahwa had more time on screen.
Overall, just watch it for a make-up less Sakshi, if you have to.
