June 08, 2023

Maja Ma: Fails To Do Justice To The Topic

By Yogendra
First publised on 2022-10-10 06:17:36

About the Author

Yogendra is freelance writer

View all posts by this Author

Maja Ma (streaming on Prime Video) is a movie that explores the hitherto taboo subject of a gay relationship. At the centre of it all is Pallavi Patel (brilliantly played by Madhuri Dixit who looks fabulous), a woman in her fifties who is a perfect wife and a doting mother, apart from being a good dancer and a good cook. Her world comes apart when during a face-off with her social activist daughter Tara (Shristi Srivastava), she tells her that she is lesbian and the altercation is video recorded by a child who goes about recording everything in the house. This recording then falls into the hands of a scheming Viral (Kavin Dave) who uses it to defame her and try and remove her husband Manohar (Gajraj Rao) as the president of the society where they live. It also leads to the American in-laws of her son Tejas (played extremely well by Ritwik Bhowmik) to demand that Pallavi take a lie-detector test to prove that she is not a lesbian.

The story then dwells on how relationships within the family are driven to the edge by a woman who tries to come out of the closet. But this is a serious subject and the social comedy line that director Anand Tiwari tries to take (and which has been so successfully done in many Ayushmann Khurrana movies) somehow fails here. It is mainly due to the fact that he reduces several characters to just caricatures and with atrocious American accents to boot. Hence, actors like Rajit Kapoor, Sheeba Chaddha and Barkha Singh look comic. Simone Singh does well in one feisty scene that she is given.

In the end, after she passes the lie-detector test, Pallavi tells her son that she could pass because they chose to ask her the wrong questions. Instead of asking her whether she slept with a woman or likes to sleep with women, if they had asked her whether she had loved a woman, she would have failed the test. The film fails to entertain, despite a dazzling Madhuri, as it meanders and the real topic of coming out is not properly explored.