from now on Modern Love Hyderabad Trailer. (manners: Amazon Prime Video India,
Throw: Nithya Menon, Revathi, Aadhi Pinisetty, Ritu Verma, Suhasini Mani Ratnam, Abhijeet Duddala, Malvika Nair, Naresh, Ulka Gupta, Komli Prasad and Raag Mayur.
the director: Nagesh Kukunoor, Venkatesh Maha, Uday Gurrala and Devika Bahudhanam.
Rating: Two and a half stars (out of 5)
working with a limited spectrum of subjects, Modern Love HyderabadAn adaptation of the essays published in the weekly New York Times column that recently formed the basis of modern love mumbaiPresents workday stories of behavioral variables in romantic and familial relationships.
Uncertainties haunt the characters, who are part of the Telugu-language Amazon Prime Video anthology of six stories, but its brilliant treatment of these built-in impossibilities allows the possibility of contradictions and complications to fully emerge and break down, in these swirls of revelations. Reduces the chances of duplicating passive vignettes. , reconciliation and rediscovery.
Some great performance, some eye-catching flashes of clarity and generally solid technical qualities turn the fare lightly and intermittently. Four of the stories use leverage as a narrative device, but only manage to present fleeting moments.
Showrunner Nagesh Kukunoor, who has also directed three volumes and co-wrote all six, contributes the best of the lot by a fair distance – a story titled My Unlikely Pandemic Dream Partner. Set in the Muslim setting of old Hyderabad, it is about a recently widowed woman who visits her estranged daughter and cooks the most delicious dishes to mend a broken relationship.
Revathi and Nithya Menon gave the two-hander their traction with impeccable performances as the mother and daughter duo were confined to the latter’s home in 2020 due to the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown.
Noori (Menon) is recovering from a major knee surgery. He has not seen his mother Mehrunnisa (Revati) as she defied her family and married six years ago. Still hurts, the two women reconnect as the mother’s culinary prowess and the daughter’s childhood memories begin to blur the distance between them.
The script by Kukunoor and Bahaish Kapoor carries forward the famous Muslim cuisine of Hyderabad as Mehrunnisa makes mouth-watering biryanis, kebabs, and ka loj and haleem. For the mother, marriage is for the caretaker. It is normal for a daughter to break up in a relationship. But can food and maternal/parental instincts demolish the fence that time has built?
Revathi, as excellent as ever, expresses a wide range of emotions with just glances and gestures. Nithya Menon dazzles as the young woman who is reconnecting with the past she has turned back. And Kukunoor brings the story to life with gripping direction.
If the other stories in the anthology were half as good as this tale of food and family, Modern Love Hyderabad would have been an unqualified success. Alas, it was not so.
The other two stories played by Kukunoor stagger between the overly traditional and the somewhat eccentric. Why did he leave me there? Rohan, a corporate super-achiever and self-help guru, takes a traditional approach to a melodrama about Dhruvraj (Naresh Agastya), who reunites from an orphanage adopted as a child. In the fragmentary flashback that follows, we learn about the days when a motherless boy spent in a slum with his aging maternal grandmother Gangamma (Suhasini Mani Ratnam) and the reason behind her adoption. Emotions abound in order to be able to rise above the hurtful.
In Fuzzy Purple and Full of Thorns, adapted by Kukunoor and Shashi Sudigala, Uday Bhaskar (Aadhi Pinnisetti), a veterinarian, meets Renu (Ritu Varma), whose slippers have been stolen from outside a temple. The chance encounter settles down and they become live-in partners.
Jealousy destroys their world when the woman finds a pair of purple stilettos in the boy’s wardrobe. The woman is a cartoonist but she doesn’t see the funny side of the man’s fetish. Animated passages are given to capture the ups and downs of Renu and Uday’s relationship. Fuzzy Purple… is alive with Ritu Varma’s performance, but this segment leaves you a bit overwhelmed as its sprinkling of humour doesn’t have the same shine.
Incidentally, this is also the curse of the other three shorts, all of which focus on young women, who face serious challenges due to their own delusions and the pressures placed on them by cautious and interfering parents. Looking for right life partner. In Venkatesh Maha’s Finding Your Penguin (also written by Kukunoor and Kapoor), Indu (Komali Prasad), after a messy break-up, obsessively seeks a stable date to pull herself out of that pit. in which she has drowned.
A nature enthusiast who consumes documentaries on the dating and mating patterns of animals and birds, Indu seeks avian traits to understand the males she zeroes in on. But is it natural to do so? Is he just looking for a lover or a soul mate for life? The answer lies in the nature of his discovery.
Parts of Breezy Finding Your Penguin are credited with a combination of writing and acting, both of which are well above average.
About That Rustle in the Bushes, directed by Devika Bahudhanam, a father (Naresh) spies on his daughter (Ulka Gupta) and the boys she dates. Needless to say, this is quite a distasteful act – the girl tells her father as much. However, there is a story behind this father’s relentless pursuit of his daughter and this segment tries hard to give it a solid foundation.
What Clown Writes This Script, directed by Telugu screenwriter and filmmaker Jandhyala Uday Gurrala! An exhausted sitcom producer Ashwin (Abhijit Duddala) decides to try something new with a stand-up comic Vandana ‘Vinny’ Bhardwaj (Malvika Nair).
We first see the latter in the middle of an act in which she salutes the world at large for not taking female comedians seriously and for their specialties on Telugu men in particular. The latter edge was liked by Ashwin’s fans. He offers Vinnie an opportunity to star in his own television show. The plans, and their nascent relationship, do not go according to the script in the person’s mind.
How much of Hyderabad is this chapter of Modern Love in terms of cultural nuances? The fictional Charminar, the food of that part of the city and Deccan Urdu/Hindi mixed with Telugu and English, apart from the heroine’s friend – Ayesha (Pavam Karanam) in Finding Your Penguin and Nazneen (Zee Aly) in Fuzzy Purple… – Occasional Breaks.
In Did the clown write this script!, Ashwin told Vini that Jandhyala introduced the Telugu audience to “a new kind of comedy”. A few years later, would anyone say the same thing about Modern Love Hyderabad? highly unlikely.