Cast – Kunal Kapoor, Zoya Hussain, Rinku Rajguru, Delzad Hiwale, Abhishek Banerjee, Nikhil Dwivedi, Palomi
Directors – Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, Abhishek Chaubey, Saket Chaudhary
BLUF
Ankahi Kahaniya, the latest produce of the anthology factory from Netflix is perhaps also the strongest case that they should enter the short film making business.
We are highly dissatisfied by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and Saket Chaudhary’s films though we want to make sure to applaud Abhishek Chaubey’s brilliance in Madhyantar.
Of the ensemble cast across the four episodes, some of the names that impress include Siddhant Mahajan, Kashish Rai, Bibriti Chatterjee, Poorti Arya, Nishank Verma, and Ankita Chakraborty.
THE MEAT AND THE POTATOES
Madhyantar is a story about young love and big-city loneliness. Two characters are drawn to each other while watching movies in a Mumbai movie hall, as they try to escape their realities every week. Every Friday, they exchange stolen glances with each other as Manjari comes to watch the latest potboiler, and Nandu serves her hot samosas during the interval. One day, he summons the courage to ask her out on a date. It’s the most thrilling moment of their lives, and you can feel it.
You feel the thrill when he finally summons the courage to ask her out on a date.
Chaubey offsets the despondency of their presence with their authenticity. In her dreams, Manjari sees Nandu as a movie hero, flicking his cigarette and herself as a sari-clad actress from the movies they watch. They feel special for each other and only in their own eyes. But they are the forgotten ones, the sort of people who exist at the perimeter of the society, igged yet living rich lives.
In Zoya Hussain and Kunal Kapoor’s story, they suspect their spouses of cheating on them with each other and decide for no specific reason that they need to psychologically analyze the reason why those two were drawn to each other in the first place. The whole segment is conversational and filmed over their brunch meetings at the Taj Mahal Tea House. The direction, overall, is aggressively strange. You can almost sense the actors trying to overcompensate for the lackluster writing, which requires them to launch into blunt monologues about their feelings at the drop of a hat. Everything that was so admirable about Chaubey’s short — genuine human emotion, a lived-in sense of place, and characters you could empathize with – is replaced by artifice, insincerity, and truly unlikeable protagonists here.
Starring Abhishek Banerjee as a salesman at a ladies’ boutique, Ashwiny Tiwari’s film is so weird in parts that we really were finding it hard to believe that she is the same person who gave us Bareilly Ki Barfi.
Banerjee’s character Pradeep falls in love with a mannequin. He dresses ‘her’, whispers sweet nothings into her ear when the boss isn’t looking, and at night, after the shutters go down, makes her dance to Bollywood songs with him. We wait till the end to figure out the ‘why’ of it. And we don’t get it.
IN THE KNOW
Starring Rinku Rajguru and Delzad Hiwale, Chaubey’s Madhyantar is the most viewable short film, and he makes good use of the structure of the narrative. His camera work is absolutely stunning and conveys more than words.
