Mumbai Meri Jaan
Synopsis:
So anyway, about halfway through Mumbai Meri Jaan, Kay Kay Menon is standing in a dusty, sun-bleached locker room shouting at a junior cop over a misplaced notepad, and it is honestly so random because he spends the whole movie playing this furious, aggressively paranoid bigoted guy who thinks everyone around him is out to get his religion and his city, but right here he is just yelling about stationary while wearing this awful, ill-fitting grey polyester uniform shirt that has a massive sweat stain right under the armpit and a missing bottom button that keeps popping open whenever he takes a deep breath. But to understand why he is losing his mind in that locker room, you have to look at how this whole ensemble drama started, which was with the 2006 Mumbai train bombings that completely upended a bunch of ordinary commuters' lives, and trust me, if you are used to the usual shiny song-and-dance numbers you see in so many mainstream bollywood movies, this thing hits you totally differently because it is gritty and messy and entirely focused on the psychological fallout rather than just cheap action thrills.
Madhavan plays this slick advertising executive who is riding the train when the blast goes off, and he manages to survive physically unscathed, but he gets completely consumed by blind rage against the system and starts posting these unhinged rants online while wearing a really sleek navy blue blazer that somehow looks way too expensive for a guy having a nervous breakdown in his kitchen, and he spends half his scenes pacing around his glass-walled apartment arguing with his poor wife and talking trash about the government until he finally goes down to the station to yell at a stranger. Right after that, Paresh Rawal pops up as an aging, deeply conservative Hindu man who shared a compartment with a Muslim passenger right before the bomb went off, and he spends his entire day dealing with this sudden, suffocating wave of suspicion towards his long-time Muslim friends, and honestly, Paresh plays the guy with this hunched-over, constantly sweating posture that makes you feel so uncomfortable just watching him walk down the street.
And then there is Irrfan Khan, who is just operating on a totally different level in this movie as a lower-class street vendor trying to sell insurance policies or whatever he can manage, and he teams up with Vijay Maurya, who plays his bumbling, nervous friend, and they spend hours walking through crowded markets talking about life and class divides and how the rich folks don't even care when poor people die in explosions. They just wander around eating sketchy street food and cracking jokes to cope with the absolute misery of their daily grind, and Irrfan has this incredible delivery where he says do you think God has a register for who gets blown up on a Tuesday, and he says it so casually while holding a half-eaten vada pav that it just breaks your heart completely. They get into all these weird arguments with customers who slam doors in their faces, and they have to dodge corrupt cops, and they just keep walking through the endless crowds of the city.
Soha Ali Khan is also in it as a fiercely ambitious television journalist who is trying to report on the bombings while dealing with her spineless boss who just wants more sensationalist footage, and she runs around the city in these sensible block heels and a beige trench coat that gets progressively more wrinkled and rained on as she chases leads, and she has to interview weeping widows and angry politicians while her own boyfriend gets increasingly sick of her obsession with the story. The movie just bounces around between all these disconnected strangers whose lives were grazed by the same catastrophe, and none of them actually meet each other, which is a choice that makes the whole narrative feel like a cross-section of a city that's trying to stitch itself back together after a trauma. Hindi films usually love to tie everything up in a neat little bow with a massive emotional climax where everyone hugs, but this film doesn't do that at all because real life doesn't work that way.
So the plot just kind of keeps meandering through their respective crises, with Madhavan shouting at his laptop screen until his voice goes hoarse, and Paresh Rawal sitting awkwardly in his living room refusing to drink tea offered by his neighbor because he's let his paranoia completely ruin his decades-long friendships, and Kay Kay Menon finally cracking under the weight of his own anger during a street patrol. The credits just sort of roll while Irrfan Khan walks away down a crowded railway platform into the hazy Mumbai twilight.
Irrfan Khan wears this terrible oversized nylon shirt through most of Mumbai Meri Jaan that looks like it cost thirty rupees at a pavement stall outside Dadar station. If I'm honest, it’s a small thing, but it bugged me every single time he came on screen because a man who sells electric shavers from a briefcase wouldn't own a shirt with that particular synthetic sheen. Nishikant Kamat made a movie about the 2006 commuter train bombings that refuses to actually show you the explosions, which is either a very brave artistic choice or a clever way to save money on visual effects, though the result is that you spend the entire runtime waiting for a shoe to drop that already hit the floor twenty minutes before the opening credits. It’s not a disaster movie in the way Hollywood handles things, and it doesn't have the glossy sheen you usually get from mainstream Hindi films when they try to tackle real-world tragedy, relying instead on a flat, dusty digital look that makes the city feel like it needs a bath.
The screenplay by Yogesh Vinayak Joshi and Ritesh Shah is structured around five separate threads that intersect only in the sense that everyone in this town is breathing the same polluted air and reading the same morning papers, which sounds like Crash or Traffic if you squint, but thankfully lacks the smug sermonizing of those multi-narrative exercises. Kay Kay Menon plays a bitter Hindu nationalist who works at a corporate office and spends his commute glaring at Muslim passengers with a terrifying, narrow-eyed intensity that feels entirely too real for comfort, and his storyline is the most jagged of the bunch because he doesn't learn a wholesome lesson by the time the credits roll. He just sits in a car while his wife tries to make polite conversation about groceries, his face frozen in that ugly, defensive sneer men wear when they know they’re in the wrong but would rather chew glass than admit it. Madhavan plays a corporate tech guy who loses his nerve and decides to quit his high-paying job to protest corporate apathy, which is the weakest link here because his moral crisis is wrapped up in dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a bad TED talk, though he tries his hardest to sell the sincerity with those big, expressive eyes that usually save him in romantic melodramas.
Then you have Paresh Rawal as an aging, bitter man who lost his best friend on the train and decides to seek out random strangers to yell at about their civic apathy, and if I’m honest, his performance suffers from that heavy-handed theatricality that ruins half of Indian cinema’s best character actors when they are handed Important Themes instead of actual character arcs. He paces around railway platforms shouting about how nobody cares about anyone else anymore, and while he is never less than completely professional, the scenes feel dragged down by a rhythm that belongs on a proscenium stage rather than inside a cramped local train compartment. Vijay Maurya pops up as a struggling, unnamed street vendor trying to make enough money to buy his kid a toy, and his segments are mercifully quiet, filled with nervous glances and shuffling feet that tell you everything you need to know about poverty without forcing him to deliver a monologue about the working classes.
Soha Ali Khan gets the short end of the stick as a television reporter chasing ratings while her fiancé tells her she’s losing her soul, and her scenes have that slightly dubbed, hollow room-tone that always pulls me right out of the illusion of reality, no matter how hard she tries to look stressed under the harsh studio lights. The camera work by Vagish Azad doesn't do her any favors either, sticking to tight, claustrophobic close-ups that make every office corridor look like a broom closet, though it captures the sweat and grit of the local trains better than any big-budget drama I've seen come out of Mumbai in years. There's a persistent, low-frequency hum on the soundtrack during the transit scenes that gets under your skin after twenty minutes, vibrating through the floorboards of your own living room if your subwoofers are turned up too high, creating an ambient sense of dread that is far more effective than any orchestral cue.
Kamaltheerthan’s editing sometimes lingers for one beat too long on a reaction shot, particularly during the scenes where characters are staring blankly at television screens reporting the death toll, which makes the pacing drag right when the momentum should be gathering steam. Yet despite those structural bumps, the film avoids the easy trap of offering neat resolutions, leaving characters stranded in their half-baked ideologies and unresolved domestic squabbles. Irrfan Khan’s character gets the most poignant, quiet fade-out, walking away down a crowded platform without a grand speech or a musical swell to tell you how to feel about him, leaving just the sound of boots on concrete and the distant rattle of an oncoming electric rake.