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‘Call Me Bae’ review: A woefully thin riches-to-rags comedy
Summary
Ananya Panday heads the Amazon Prime series ‘Call Me Bae’, which never rises above low-grade fluff
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is a 1975 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It's one of the most disturbing and difficult viewing experiences in cinema, a long series of degradations visited upon a group of teens by sadistic fascists. It runs just under two hours. Call Me Bae is a new series on Amazon Prime, eight episodes of sitcom length. I’m not sure watching Salò and then watching it all over again isn’t a less painful use of four hours than the same time spent with Bae.
After socialite Bella ‘Bae’ Chowdhury (Ananya Panday) is caught with her hunky trainer, her husband, Agastya (Vihaan Samat), tosses her out of their home. She returns, defeated, to her family’s Delhi mansion. But the Rajwanshes have decided the scandal is too much for them; golden boy Samar, Bella’s brother, is in business with Agastya as well. Bae is offered a one-way ticket to Los Angeles (“Malibu wala ghar"). Instead, she impulsively heads to Mumbai.
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There’s an ominous mention in the first episode of a course in ‘social media journalism’ that Bae did. Sure enough, Vir Das turns up as TRP-hungry anchor Satyajit Sen—working at a channel called TRP. Bae, disgusted by his bullying of an actress on air, drunkenly rants about Satyajit for her legion of Instagram followers. Through a sequence of events too contrived to even recap, this gets her hired as an intern at TRP—by Neel (Gurfateh Pirzada), an anchor who does ‘real news’ that no one watches.
There’s a bit of Schitt’s Creek in the idea of Bae’s descent from riches to comic poverty. But Call Me Bae, created by Ishita Moitra and written Samina Motlekar, Rohit Nair and Moitra, is quick to insist on the essential niceness of Bella, even if she’s vain and shallow (she posts bail for a stranger in the first episode). There’s a storytelling game she plays with others at the ‘Lostel’ that’s as desperate an attempt at poor-little-rich-kid as I’ve ever seen. Shoplifting as a cry for help might not be as relatable as Dharmatic thinks it is.
Ah, the Lostel. During an actors’ roundtable in 2019, Siddhant Chaturvedi sardonically responded to an Ananya Panday comment on nepotism with, “Their struggle begins where our dreams are fulfilled." Nothing embodies this better than the boarding house Bae finds herself in, a deluded rich person’s idea of how working people live. The rooms are cozy and colourful. The strugglers in residence unwind in the evening over wine and slam poetry. Even the wildlife is a step above—instea of a stray dog or cat, an owl shows up.
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Bae’s rant has an even unlikelier outcome than getting her employed. She’s sent an anonymous video, which she watches with new roommates Saira (Muskkaan Jaferi) and Tamarrah (Niharika Lyra Dutt), and trainer Prince (yes, that trainer). A woman, her face obscured, identifies herself as a famous actor, and says she's being sexually harassed by businessman Mukul Sawla. “I feel you won’t hesitate to show and speak the truth," she says to the intern with no qualifications, credibility or, for all she knows, interest in her predicament.
The farcical tone of the series sits uneasily with the passages where Bae is doing what passes for investigative journalism. Hindi cinema is happy to flatter influencers who think they’d be great at whatever job they tried, but this is ridiculous. “You’re the smartest person I know," Neel tells Bae. Granted he’s besotted with her, but no relationship should be founded on a lie this big.
In last year’s Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, a more thoughtful look at young folks drifting through life, perpetually on social media, Panday was resonant. She isn’t yet the kind of actor who can salvage a thinly written and directed series. But her comic timing is uncommonly deft, and there’s a gentleness to her conception of Bae that’s quite disarming. (I like how she leans into Bae’s flightiness despite knowing the public perception of her isn’t miles off the character she’s playing.) The writing defeats her girl-power scenes with Dutt and Jaferi, but there’s a delightful romantic track with Dutt and the very funny Varun Sood as Prince.
I kept hoping till the last episode that Call Me Bae would attempt at least one surprise (my money was on Satyajit—whose home life receives undue attention —turning out to be less evil than we thought). But nothing of the sort happens. Mukul and Satyajit start as villains and end that way, a basic MeToo story to tack onto unending fluff. “You were awesome today," Neel tells Bae. “You mean flawsome," she replies. “My flaws make me awesome." Since we’re coining words, I found Call Me Bae flawful. Its flaws make it awful.
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