The Mehta Boys
Starring Boman Irani and Avinash Tiwari
Directed by Boman Irani
I was amused and exasperated to wake up to see a review claiming that a ‘brilliant’ Avinash Tiwari ‘outshines’ Boman Irani in The Mehta Boys (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video).
Firstly, this is quite untrue, and secondly, this is not a kabaddi match. But a delicately poised father-son mellow drama, where any effort by the two principal actors to outshine each other would have landed the film flat on its face.
Irani and Tiwari, as father and son Shiv and Amay playing a hostile pair on screen, are fulsomely aligned as actors, so much so that I wondered how much they must have worked towards achieving this level of compatibility on screen.
Boman Irani’s first stab at direction stabs you in the heart. The father-son conflict is as old as Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti and as recent as Parambrata Chatterjee’s Ie Raat Tomar Amar. Irani, who has co-written this strong screenplay with Alexander Dinelaris on a fragile relationship, doesn’t allow the central relationship to slip out of his control, nor does he ignore the secondary characters: Amay’s sister Anu (Puja Sarup) and girlfriend Zara (Shreya Choudhary) are both elegantly encrypted into the plot.
The vivid sequences have an episodic feel to them: Amay’s mother dies, his sister decides to take her father with her to the US, Amay must spend a weekend with his father on account of a missed flight, etc… The flow of life and the throb of emotions that define each of us through our relationships define Boman Irani’s structural edifice.
The Mehta Boys has a live-in feel to it, and yet we feel there is something happening here that we haven’t seen before. It is interesting how Irani weaves the father-son conflict into an architectural theme without over-metaphorizing the narration. There is a simplicity in the storytelling underlined by a subliminal tension which keeps us invested in the core-relationship till the end. Although we kind of know how it will pan out, finally, we remain curious about how Irani intends to get there.
Some first-timer self-indulgence—for example, the ongoing leitmotif of Shiv ‘seeing’ his dead wife or father and son bonding over Chaplin—could have been avoided.
For those of us who always believed that an actor turning director should stay behind the camera, here is ample evidence to the contrary. The impressively gifted actor Boman Irani makes an assured, sensitive directorial debut. There is sufficient emotional heft and storytelling craft in The Mehta Boys to qualify it as one of the best films of this year. It is not without its flaws. What is life without them?!
