‘Metro In Dino’ review: Overstuffed, uneven, but not without its charms

You’d think Anurag Basu would want to steer as clear of Jagga Jasoos as possible. Yet, the opening of Metro In Dino runs towards that wildly ambitious and notoriously unsuccessful 2017 film with open arms. It’s a true-blue musical sequence: multiple stories, conversational vocals, passing nimbly from character to character. In a film suffused with romantic gestures, this might be the ultimate one. At a time when Hindi directors are trying to make the least musical musicals possible, Basu wants to give viewers the 100-proof version.

Basu’s career can be divided into two neat halves: the turbulent love stories from Saaya (2003) to Kites (2010), and then, Barfi (2012) onwards, the embrace of colour and whimsy. Metro In Dino takes its structure from a key first-half work, 2007’s Life In a Metro, but it's rendered in his later lush style. It’s loving, playful, affecting, overstuffed—all the things that come with watching a Anurag Basu film. 

There are four stories, though these multiply and mutate and overlap until it’s all one big ball of ache and longing. Klutzy, underconfident Chumki (Sara Ali Khan) accidentally crosses paths with breezy playboy Parth (Aditya Roy Kapur); though she’s engaged and clearly not his type, they find themselves drawn to one another. Kajol (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Monty’s (Pankaj Tripathi) marriage has lost its shine, a problem exacerbated when she discovers his fake profile on a dating app. Akash (Ali Fazal) has quit his job to make it as a musician in Mumbai, leaving his wife, Shruti (Fatima Sana Shaikh), increasingly miserable. And Shivani (Neena Gupta) embarks on a small act of rebellion, travelling against the wishes of husband to a college reunion where she’ll meet her former love, Parimal (Anupam Kher). And there are cross-stitches: Kajol and Chumki are sisters, Shivani is their mother, Parth is Akash and Shruti’s best friend. 

Basu weaves in and out of these stories, sometimes with the help of a sutradhar rock band fronted by the film’s composer, Pritam (the same device was used in Life In a Metro). With additional strands involving Shivani’s husband, Kajol and Monty’s daughter, Shruti’s coworker and Chumki’s fiancée, it’s not hard to imagine how convoluted it all becomes. Basu embraces the mess, gathering up revelations and decisions into a rolling series of montages. These are moving in and of themselves, but there are so many such emotional peaks that the film can’t build properly towards a resolution. It exhausts itself emotionally, then starts over again, and again.  

On the Goldilocks scale, I found Shivani-Parimal too cold and both Kajol-Monty and Chumki-Parth too hot (Sen Sharma and Tripathi become more appealing as their story becomes more farcical). Akash-Shruti, though, are just right, honest and messy in a lifelike way. Akash, lonely and unhappy, starts to wonder about his wife’s fidelity—a suspicion misdirected but not unfounded. And though she supports his decision to follow his dream, Shruti doesn’t hesitate to throw his father’s failure as a musician, and his own, in his face. Shaikh and Fazal are great together—he’s so adept at playing jealous—and their scenes have an emotional force missing in the other storylines. 

There’s a lovely, sharp moment where Akash pays twisted tribute to his father: “Unknown singer, average life, unremarkable death.” This is the fate that all the characters in Metro In Dino are trying to escape. What looks like selfish, needy floundering is actually a desperate attempt to gain some control, live the sort of life that doesn’t feel like a perpetual compromise. 

Two absences hang over Metro In Dino, turn it melancholy. KK, who sang the stormy Alvida and soaring O Meri Jaan in the earlier film, is no more. Also sadly departed is Irrfan, whose cheery Monty is perhaps the most beloved of Life In A Metro’s characters. It’s no coincidence that Sen Sharma—who played opposite Irrfan in the 2007 film—is the only returning member of the cast, and that Tripathi’s Monty is in a similar comic vein. 

Despite their frustrations, Basu’s films offer unique pleasures. Unlike so many directors in Hindi cinema today, he actually seems to want to make scenes look and sound interesting. He can do it with music, whether it’s traditional playback montage or Hollywood musical style. He can do it visually, like the Christopher Doyle-esque shudder during Chumki and Parth’s first meeting. Sometimes he allows the setting to do the work—a bar game, a canoe for two. Sometimes he just runs with a simple idea. When Akash is contemplating leaving his comfortable life for an uncertain future as a musician, I idly thought what an Imtiaz Ali decision this was. In the very next scene, who else does Akash run into but… Imtiaz Ali. 

There are other directors who’ll do a job, do it efficiently. But filmgoing is more fun when Basu’s playing in his sandbox.