In Anurag Basu’s Metro…In Dino, all the uncertainties and vicissitudes of modern-day relationships collide. Across the age-bracket, romance blooms as a sudden guest, withers away and eventually recoups its initial promise. Basu hurtles you through the many, entangling dilemmas of a relationship, the bumps in its wide span. It’s messy, frequently hurtful, ridden with icy breaks and a lot of doubt. But eventually, Basu’s vision of contemporary romance retains a warm, reassuring optimism. What you need is a gradual realignment of wavelengths that are mutually agreeable, affirmed.
Opening with an unabashed musical number, each of the four couples in the narrative is introduced. Mistakes, confusion, the deadening monotony of longtime coupledom, remaining in a relationship just for old time’s sake-all is laid out in the vivid, expansive start. Like in Life…In A Metro (2007), Pritam, the returning composer, pops up at various public places with his band, including Papon. Music was the engine of the previous film. Here, though, barring the instantly dazzling opening, songs crowd more than evoke something sublime. Cuts to the band performing also rupture the momentum more than once. At times, the dubbing looks visibly distracting. Nevertheless, the uncontained glee and recklessness in Basu’s storytelling helps to offset few serious blind spots.
Chumki (Sara Ali Khan) is engaged but starts having second thoughts when she runs into the casanova charmer, Parth (Aditya Roy Kapur). Akash (Ali Fazal) quits his corporate job to pursue his passion for music in Mumbai. His wife, Shruti (Fatima Sana Shaikh), supports him and suffers. He’s too caught up in his own dad issues, the need for success to even give her time. It’s a middle-aged marriage’s ennui and disaffection, the ache for a spark where Metro…In Dino cruises by. Chumki looks up to her sister, Kajol’s (Konkona Sen Sharma) longstanding marriage as the ideal. But much of Kajol’s marriage, in its present state, has turned impassive. The only time Kajol and her husband, Monty (Pankaj Tripathi) huddle closer in bed is discussing their daughter’s weekly schedule. Their relationship is further jolted when she discovers him secretly browsing a dating app and being thrilled. Enraged, she digs to test how far he’s ready to go. Sen Sharma and Tripathi are absolutely delightful together. The latter’s terrific comic timing makes the track glide by. There’s also Shivani (Neena Gupta), Chumki and Kajol’s mother who has long buried her dreams in looking after them and home. Shivani’s husband forbids her from going to a college reunion but she takes off and re-encounters her former love, Parimal (Anupam Kher).
Till mid-point, Basu breezily leaps between the tracks. It feels convincing, fluid and emotionally credible. But once you get a hang of these characters, the screenplay gets too content. It grows disinterested to further develop them, instead bunging in dramatic decisions like a sudden windfall. Basu’s juggling of the four couples also slips. One has much happening, like the Parimal-Shibani rekindling. The exaggerated tone Basu is ever fond of resembles here farcical elements. Performatively, the pitch steeply rises. What could have been endearing rasps.
Some threads just run in circles, like Akash and Shruti coming together and again scattering apart. Fazal and Shaikh valiantly try to rescue their long-distance couple track, where one of whose pursuit of passion tends to steamroll the other’s endless patience.
How long do you keep faith in love? At what point, does the effort to reinstate the relationship border on overly desperate, outright delusional? Some might label it toxic, as the commitment-phobe Parth is quick to suggest to Shruti. But she wants to make it work, even if Akash is all over the place. Much of the relationship’s emotional burden is borne by her. Shaikh brings a fine, anguished specificity to the film’s most broadly etched track. This romance is all about weathering the big-city crush, yet the way Shruti effortlessly switches professions and places renders the couple’s struggle a bit removed.
The key problem here is the question of the city-space itself. Unlike the Mumbai-limited Life In A…Metro, this film hops among Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Goa. This spatial blur strips away the focalising city-presence, making it indistinct. Apart from the obvious tokenistic landmarks, you can barely tell one from the other. Even the particular location of Parimal’s Kolkata house, with a view of the Howrah Bridge, is one of those off-putting contrivances designed to clearly indicate a setting. Of course, the College Street Coffee House also props up. Parimal's daughter takes a tram to work while saying she's already late. It's frankly ridiculous. Where’s the personality and fizz of a city? Neither does Mumbai’s rains yield any enthrallment, or a purposeful hitch for the characters. Basu, who has also shot the film with Abhishek Basu, is at his most visually tame here. But a zinger of a number, where lovers recount their first meetings and proposals via songs, weaves through the room with lightness and magic.
The chipper energy nicely set up in the first half diffuses post-interval. A solid sense of rhythm begins to falter and lose its way amidst the meandering mess. Even Chumki’s choosing the ‘safer option’ as her partner is only tied to her self-proclaimed indecisiveness. As energetically amiable Kapur tries to be, his playboy man-child character’s pivot to maturity arrives as a strained jump. A sub-plot involving Kajol and Monty’s 15-year-old daughter conflicted over her sexual orientation is too stretched and glib. The same can be said for an overdone riff on Sen Sharma’s iconic rooftop scream from the previous film.
In spite of its extravagant 159 minute-length, Metro…In Dino combs in a lot. One of the major refrains insists on placing trust in a relationship, lending second chances-allowing for reconciliation, despite how tough, humiliating the ask is. Amidst transgression, allure of a better-seeming life with some stranger who might bring greater joy and stability, how do you stick with your partner? It’s a constant tussle between snipping the bond and believing the other to pull through. There are all sorts of straying, long-repressed desires of women gaining express, the stasis of no longer being giddy about the same partner. Basu lets women be impetuous, silly, brittle and sassy.
The film is also about women across generations, nudging one another to be bolder, not settle for the cop-out. There’s a lot of regret Shivani has lived with for most of her life, and she urges her daughters to seize their happiness with no apology. She has picked the cue from her own daughter. In spare scenes like a prickly confrontation between Shivani and Kajol, the film kicks into full gear. As someone lashing out at her mother for advising her to overlook Monty’s indiscretions, Sharma is spectacularly ferocious, bitter and chafing. Like all great actors, she can lithely move from hurt to rage. There’s this tiny flicker she does in the scene. Sen Sharma’s face darkens with a taunt as Kajol attacks her mother for enduring what she did unprotestingly and now expecting her to do the same. Stabs of such scenes make Metro…In Dino occasionally reach places of searing emotional depth.
