The Mehta Boys—Sensitive, personal tour of parent and son

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Can a voyage be made into a parent-son relationship that is oh-so-personal and sensitive? If you are writer-director Boman Irani, of course you can travel into that realm. You can laugh there, have lumps in your throat and have tears welling up, and squirm as you identify a person there with yourself, irrespective of which side of the age bracket you are. You can feel the anger, resentment, hurt, offense and other complexities of relationships that can only happen amidst closest family members.

I am fairly certain that unless you are a Mahesh Bhatt kind of human being who liked to narrate his own life stories, you can only excel at an opposite kind of display of bonds to the ones you have in your life. Let me explain: only a happily-married B.R. Chopra can look candidly at extramarital relationships with diverse dynamics, as in Gumrah (1963) and Pati Patni Aur Woh (1978).

Boman Irani, who has two loving sons (his words) who are family-oriented, thus looks at a dysfunctional father-son relationship with directorial and scripting aplomb, as he will happily never undergo that kind of trauma. Like I always feel and actors have endorsed, it is easier to portray someone totally different from your real-life persona. And yet, Boman uses some interesting personal nuances as well! Well, life is always a mix of the real and the stranger-than-fiction real!

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71 years-old Shiv (Boman Irani) is at loggerheads with son Amay (Avinash Tiwary), who has moved on to Mumbai from their small-town cottage to carve his own place as an architect, but is yet not able to do so despite an indulgent boss (Siddhartha Basu). His colleague and later girlfriend, Zara (Shreya Chaudhry) feels that he has the ability to be the best, but lacks confidence.

Shiv feels that what Amay has done—living alone and in a miserable condition (his apartment is leaky too, apart from his stressful life) is totally senseless and that Amay has hurt his mother deeply in the process. In turn, Amay resents the fact that his father is forever berating him.

As a prior arrangement, Shiv and his wife have both decided that whenever one of them passes on, the other will move in with daughter Anu to Florida. And so when his mother dies suddenly, and Amay reaches the family home, the undercurrent of hostility between dad and him remains even in that moment of girl and the knowledge that dad will soon leave India for good.

However, an unusual circumstance leads to Shiv having to stay for 48 hours in Mumbai with Amay before his departure to the US. When Anu sees reluctance on both her father’s and brother’s face to stay together, she warns both “the Mehta boys” (they have yet to grow up, she rightly feels!) to behave.

At Amay’s apartment, Shiv comes to know of Amay’s “fiancée” (as Shiv terms Zara!) and insists on meeting her over a dinner that he will host in a posh restaurant.

But in every little detail, down to Amay working out designs on his laptop rather than “with paper and pencil” (the way Shiv reminds Amay the Taj Mahal was constructed!), the nitpicks, squabbles and arguments escalate, with Zara becoming a kind of sandwich between them.

Boman has worked in every film of Rajkumar Hirani, but though we do see influences of that director (the humor mixed with pathos and drama) in the basic tenor, his grammar and composition is very different. The Mehta Boys is a very lifelike film, told uber-realistically, and not at all paced or intended for the masses.

Though very high on the emotional voltage, its narration is simple but quite Western in ethos, and that proves to be both its strength and undoing. And I use the latter word because it could have effectively been a need-of-the-hour story for GenZ and GenY—and everyone up to senior citizens in India. In short, with a little Indian slant in style and treatment, this wonderful saga could have retained its core and appealed to the masses and small-town denizens as well, much like the Rajshri Productions delights of yore. The relationship between Shiv and Zara, for example, connects best because it has the basics of Indian respect and bonding between a girl and her fiancé / boyfriend’s father.

Still, accepting the film in the way it is, I would call it, based on its target urban audience (the English dialogues come in freely), a deep and intimate look at how relationships between human beings can be influenced negatively by minor issues snowballing psychologically into major hiccups. And fundamentally, this is because neither father nor son has really matured and are, in fact, egoistic in their own “know-it-all” cockiness.

Boman Irani is outstanding—and by that I mean both as the phenomenal (there is no other word I can think of right now) actor that he has always been, and as a filmmaker. The script, written along with Alexander Dinelaris, is fine too, taken on its own steam with the sweet little nuances (like the hospital scene, the one at the passport office, the way he narrates how he first fell for his wife, or the handbrake sequence) lifting the film a lot.

On the other hand, Shiv imagining his wife Shivani in the market seems straight out of a melodramatic Hindi film and could have been replaced by a more cerebral way of showing how much he misses his wife, or even why he lands up in hospital, and that sequence also is only used for a certain point that could have been shown in, perhaps, another way.

Avinash Tiwary and Puja Sarup, in their long and short respective roles, are excellent too, and Shreya Chaudhary is also perfect as Zara, The technical values are upscale, especially the production design by Payal Ghose, but the background score could have been more inventive and fresh.

I would sum up the film as a pleasurable watch, with a lot to learn from the characters about how good human beings end up messing up bonds with those who actually matter the most.

Rating: ***1/2

Amazon Prime Video presents Irani Movietone LLP’s & Chalkboard Entertainment’s The Mehta Boys Produced by: Boman Irani, Danesh Irani, Shujaat Saudagar & Vipin Agnihotri Directed by: Boman Irani  Written by: Boman Irani & Alexander Dinelaris  Starring: Boman Irani, Avinash Tiwary, Shreya Chaudhary, Puja Sarup, Siddhartha Basu, Harssh Singh & others

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