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Nonika Singh

Love, loss and surprising sources of connection and companionship; in a way the short brief of the new Netflix anthology says it all. Unsaid, however, is more obvious than implicit.

Still, there is a piquant quality to all three stories connecting the three tales and connecting us to its telling. Three talented directors Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, Abhishek Chaubey and Saket Chaudhary come together to tell a story each. The common factor is how lonely souls in Mumbai find a connection amidst atypical circumstances. The opening short by Tiwari has a lonely man striking a bond with, of all the things, a mannequin. In a virtual world that we all are inhabiting, this connection should not raise eyebrows. But it does create friction in this guileless man’s life.

Abhishek Banerjee, as the rather diffident salesman Pradeep, is evocative and mirrors a gamut of expressions, even when his ‘co-actor’ is lifeless. His interface with the mannequin is suitably animated. His eyes twinkle at her isight, his hands quiver as he puts his arm around her waist. And, there is a lingering ache when he finally utters the words underlying his relationship with a mannequin, underpinning the theme of the story which is rather obvious. Abhishek Chaubey’s short takes us back to 1980s when single screen cinema ruled and the attention to detail is commendable. From the innards of a projection room to the coffee machine to nan-khatai, each prop has been chosen carefully.

Based on a Kannada story Madhyantara by Jayant Kaikini, Chaubey’s film has layers and nuances. He plays up love for cinema to weave a love story that is far from filmy. Its extraordinariness lies in its characters’ ordinariness as well as the narrative style.

The unusual premise is remarkable, so is the manner in which it comes together. The Sairat actor Rinku Rajguru as the young girl besotted by cinema, for whom watching movies is as much an escape from her drudgery as a flight of fantasy is once again at her exp

Half Girlfriend, adapted from a novel by Chetan Bhagat, is like a factory-made Swiss roll: a sickly-sweet smelling, squishy, artificially-flavoured byproduct that passes off as the real thing. You know something is off from one look at the packaging — and it tastes worse. But such monstrosity sells by the truckloads after mind-numbing advertising and targeting the right demographic do the trick.

Like an error in judgement made with utmost insincerity and a foresight for profits, the Swiss roll analogy sticks equally to Chetan Bhagat’s novel — some of the most amateur material that I’ve skimmed through — and its motion picture counterpart directed by Mohit Suri.

In the movie (and the novel) a loser youngster from rural Bihar (Madhav, played by an ever-ballooning Arjun Kapoor) aces a college scholarship and mostly succeeds in wooing a mopey rich girl (Riya played by Shraddha Kapoor) who dreams of singing in a New York restaurant one day.

Madhav, who understands but cannot speak fluent English, is a buffoon whose kind nature turns into carnal frustration when Riya wouldn’t ‘do it’ with him. She only sees him as a friend (and a worse-case scenario love-interest), agreeing to be his ‘half girlfriend.’ Like the logic-defying irrelevance of the film’s title, this confuses the hell out of the country bumpkin. (To put a spin on Al Pachino’s dialogue from The Devil’s Advocate: “Look (and peck) but do not touch.”)

She dumps him for a rich snob, leaves for the US only to return to his life as a divorcee because even losers deserve a second chance. (Spoiler alert: she promptly fakes a fatal disease and runs away again). He returns home to mum who runs a small school and stumbles on a United Nation’s grant for rural schools in Bihar funded by Bill Gates. And yes, Bill does make an entrance late in the movie — as a CGI-ed head on top of a tall, lanky body.

A weekend watch comprising Half Girlfriend and Saba Qamar’s Bollywood debut, Hindi Medium

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