Collin D’Cunha surely has what it takes. Call Me Bae, which is streaming on Amazon Prime from September 6, is no ordinary happening. It is monstrously entertaining and insanely binge-worthy. What’s more, it doesn’t make any concerted effort to seduce us into its storytelling.
It doesn’t need to. It breaks all the rudimentary rules of the streaming business with content that is unapologetically formulistic and emphatically entertaining. The series is at once a jolt to the norm and a visit to La La Land.
Every character is real yet fairytale-like. Good looks are prerequisite. But no one here is an airhead. The protagonist discusses Naipaul with as much authority as Gucci. The idea is to tease audiences with a high dose of the don’t-we-know-this-character aphrodisiac.
Vir Das is especially a scream as a self-obsessed news journalist who shouts his way into nightly attention through the TRPs. The rest of the cast too, particularly Gurfateh Pirzada, Varun Sood, Vihaan Samat, Muskkaan Jaferi, Niharika Lyra Dutt, Lisa Mishra are borderline brilliant, bringing to the broad-mouthed fish-bowl canvas a freshness and charm in equal proportions. These are actors who know the world they are inhabiting and go about imbuing their character with a nod of familiarity and a comfort of the known, without being smug or over-selfassured.
The screenplay (Ishita Moitra, Samina Motlekar and Rohit Nair) gives the protagonist Bella/Bae a wide arc. Ananya Pandey goes from disgraced trophy wife to celebrated MeToo champion with a poise and flourish which belie her bimboesque image. Call Me Bae is her calling card to a kind of stardom that most of her critics had never anticipated.
Unlike other chick flicks, the actors who play Bae’s spouse/admirers, ex-es are not reduced to shadow play. Each man and woman one is an individual, helping the hurting healing but happy Bae to find her groove. While she does, the narrative springs a series of amiable episodes filled with vigour and vim, replete with a respiratory rhythm that resonates with the dreams and desires of privileged youngsters who may not have to worry about where their next Jimmy Choo is coming from. But they have their own struggles to fret over.
Call Me Bae is the kind of zany yet ruminative entertainment that we haven’t seen on the streaming platform since Sacred Games.
