Moderately engaging film that struggles with inconsistent pacing
Cricket and marriage get an awkward tangle Mr. and Mrs. MahiA sports melodrama that relies on action on the field of play and plenty of backlash from it, mostly in a relationship that runs on complicated terrain.
The Sharan Sharma-directed film is about sports but also involves a story of marital strife when thwarted ambitions collide with suppressed emotions. The narrative is unusual to say the least but the treatment is without any major departures from the norm.
A man who has never had it easy helps his wife to revive and hone the rough-and-tumble batting skills she acquired as a girl playing tennis ball cricket with the neighborhood boys.
Rajkummar Rao and Janhvi Kapoor play two cricket fans who become life partners. When the man failed to get a second chance to make it big as a cricketer, the duo decided to catapult their energy and experience to a different junior doctor woman at Jaipur Hospital to the big leagues of the game.
Produced by Zee Studios and Dharma Productions and written by Sharan Sharma and Nikhil Mehrotra – the ensemble produced Gunjan Saxena: Kargil Girl – Mr. and Mrs. Mahi All in all, a moderately engaging film that struggles with inconsistent pacing.
It is simplistic and overarching in its exploration of sporting achievements and its private and public spinoffs. The central emotion of the film feels stretched.
The story revolves around a girl whose father forces her to give up cricket to prioritize her medical education, but the film mainly revolves around the man she marries. The latter is a failed cricketer who is forced by his domineering father to stop playing and join the family’s sporting goods store.
Two daddies, Mahendra Aggarwal and his wife Mahima Aggarwal née Sharma – both names shortened to Mahi – played by Kumud Mishra and Purnendu Bhattacharya have to step up to break free from the shackles of their family.
Cricket emboldens and binds them but it also threatens to tear them apart. Their struggle for freedom and fulfillment also involves coming to terms with success and the rewards that fame and recognition offer. Trained by her husband, Mahima progressed quickly and made it to the Rajasthan women’s team.
With a mix of cross-batted strokes, orthodox off drives and cheeky switch-hits, the lady seized her opportunities and quickly overwhelmed Mahendra. As she plunges under the ever-increasing media spotlight, the husband mourns and grumbles. He thinks he deserves to be respected as a successful talent-spotter.
Mr. and Mrs. MahiAt least parts of it, if it had stuck to a comic vein, would have worked better as it hits when a disgruntled Mahendra makes the reel to inform the world of his role in the late bloomer’s rapid ascent to glory.
Mr. and Mrs. Mahi Never rises to the bone although it has elements that make it passable as a relationship drama set against a cricketing backdrop.
For one, it doesn’t force viewers to drive home the incessant chatter of blubbermouth commentators and the screams of roaring spectators and the ‘exciting’ effect of sporting action on screen.
The film reverts to on-field chatter and a tense coach’s instructions from across the line as a device to flesh out the play and provide additional information about Mahima’s hits and misses.
As the film focuses on the exploits of a single player, everyone else, Mahima’s team members as well as his opponents, are mere additions thrown in to provide him with a platform to showcase his wares.
Off the field, Mahima is patient and unflappable. In this one, he’s dynamite. He has a swing on every delivery he faces. Hitting fours and sixes is easy for him. If the ball is in the slot, I hit, he says. He was hit by bouncers several times. To be sure, he is down but never out.
But no matter how desperately the film tries, the tension isn’t as intense and infectious as it’s intended to be. It’s easy to guess how the situation will turn out for Mahima and her husband who has a thing or two to prove to her suspicious father. That takes a great deal of the fun out of the proceedings.
The lead actors do their bit to invest us in the narrative and the emotions of the two main characters. Rajkumar Rao, always on an even turf, casts Mahendra’s blame, some at his father, others at his wife, with conviction even when the lines the character speaks are mired in self-pity.
Janhvi Kapoor’s Mahima does a good job of walking between indecisiveness and assertiveness. He steers Willow perfectly like a scrappy professional, but has to deal with the marital tensions and pressures of the feminine power she’s supposed to represent.
Mahima is projected as a woman whose fate is always in the hands of the men in her life – her father, her husband and the coach of the women’s team, whose passionate ultimatums keep her on her toes. For the most part, he played along, much to his resignation.
When he finally dares to tell I don’t want your help (I don’t need your help), one can’t help but wonder why it took him so long to come to this conclusion.
That is, in a sense, the sum Mr. and Mrs. Mahi. The film makes the right noise but not before the female protagonist is subjected to a crush created by the men around her. And in the end, it was not her father but her husband’s father who had to be mollified. A girl achieves many things but she can only be happy if her husband and her father are happy.
What the movie implies is that a woman is incomplete without a man. Conflicting and complex messaging is a mix that gets nowhere. The result is a tale of poor gender equality that winds its way, at times tediously, to a rather predictable end.
