Maja Ma: Fails To Do Justice To The Topic
Yogendra is freelance writer
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By Yogendra
First publised on 2022-10-10 06:17:36
About the Author
Yogendra is freelance writer
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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.
