One of the terrific filmmakers, Hansal Mehta, who has shown the brilliance of his storytelling in an anthology before with Das Kahaniyaan, is now brimming in the success of a mind-blowing story of love called ‘Baai’ in Modern Love Mumbai. The short film showcases love in the most sensitive way possible.
For Mehta, Baai captures and honours that unconditional love, one that we inherently seek irrespective of the nature of the relationship. It’s an ode to love that’s free from the burden of labels and the pressures of conforming. On making a story on love without any restrictions and handling it in the most sensitive way possible, Mehta says, “Many people told me that my story is very sensitively handled. For me, sensitivity is a very basic requirement of being a human being. I find nothing out of the ordinary to be sensitive. The reason we exist and the reason we love are that we are sensitive to each other. And the reason we even hate is also that we are sensitive. For me, I just approached it as a love story. For me, it was a love story about acceptance and it’s about how we make such societal barriers and the need to break it. The short film Baai shows the love story between a grandmother and a grandson. It is also a love story between two men.”
Getting all the actors together wasn’t an easy task for him. Mehta says, “It’s a synergistic relationship with casting director Mukesh Chabbra. We have been working together for eleven years. In Scam, he was the person who introduced me to Pratik Gandhi. In Baai too, he was the one who suggested and pushed me to cast Tanuja Mukherjee and also to speak to Ranveer Brar. It is like from the script the characters were jumping out and you somehow find people resonating the same values of the character with the same vibe and energy. It is difficult to define the process of getting them together. But it was a very organic process and doesn’t have any pre-set definition.”
Women’s roles are changing with the coming of OTT and veteran actress Tanuja Mukherjee who plays the role of Baai in Modern Love Mumbai says, “I think filmmakers are seeing women finally as artists capable of doing meaningful roles. And hence the portrayal of women now in shows and films has become different. It is a very good time to be an actor since change is the only constant. The industry is going through a very interesting change. OTT has given women the chance to experiment with different kinds of roles. It is different from the usual Bollywood films that used to be.”
Pratik Gandhi plays the closeted gay man Manzu with complete ease. The highest preparation for Gandhi was to not put the gay man in a box. It is not that they have a certain type of body language and they walk and talk in a certain way. He says, “They are one of us and it is difficult to understand unless somebody tells you. We wanted to keep it real and natural and human.”
Gay roles in the past have been shown in Bollywood in a very caricaturish way. Gandhi feels humour and comedy have always been used as a tool to communicate the most difficult things. He explains, “When you are not sure how to say a difficult thing, you use the tool of comedy and cover it. Here the challenge was more of an excitement. Hansal Mehta told me if you replace the two characters with two girls or one girl and one boy, it will still remain the same. So, the crux of the whole story was love and we were just telling a love story.”
We see chef Ranveer Brar who made his debut with Baai on cooking up a storm and acting too. On getting the role of playing a gay man who is a Chef in Baai, Brar narrates, “I got a call from the casting office of Baai and I was told that Hansal Mehta is directing it. Fifty percent of the job of agreeing to play the role was done and then I loved the script too. As chefs we are storytellers and every dish is a story and the power of the story just jumped through the script.”
Food reflects in all the stories of Modern love Mumbai because it is the emotion of love when it transcends beyond human relationships, food automatically sets in. Food is a form of love and stays with us forever. The only hiccup Brar says was, “It is not a role that you are trained for or you want to debut in. But I think that was very pleasantly uncomfortable because all the other roles that I got were of villains of South Indian movies. And knowing Hansal sir and his love for food it was the best place to be in.”
As Manzu played by Pratik Gandhi rightly says in the film, ‘Music doesn’t see whether you are straight or gay.’ Talking about the opportunities offered by OTT, Gandhi explains, “In the same way OTT doesn’t see whether you are trained or unstrained. It just looks at how you did and what was the role. And I think people are more accepting of this platform. It just allows you to do what you want to do and then leaves it to the bigger good.”
Explaining how OTT doesn’t put you inside boxes and that nobody is a hero on the digital platform, Hansal Mehta signs off by saying, “I don’t understand the meaning of a hero. For me there is only one hero and that is Mahatma Gandhi. Certain characters have more screen time and certain characters have less. But everybody follows a journey and as audiences we become part of this journey.”
Modern Love Mumbai is streaming on Amazon Prime Video
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