In her new film, Maja Ma, on Prime Video, Madhuri Dixit plays the lead role of a devoted housewife trying to reclaim her individuality
Amazon Prime Video’s new film with Madhuri Dixit in the lead role — Pallavi Patel, a woman in her middle ages, making coconut laddoos at home as well as sublime dandiya moves under red and blue lights in her hometown Vadodara — is a tempered update on the Balaji canon of family dramas on the tube long before OTTs made it routine for women protagonists to carry a film or web-series.
Pallavi’s husband Manohar (Gajraj Rao) is the ubiquitous Indian man who loves the couch and has a diffident and stumbling exterior about him. Pallavi’s son Tejas (Ritwik Bhowmik), who works in the US and has fallen in love with Esha (Barkha Singh), the daughter of an influential NRI with political ambitions, a Trump crony, Bob (Rajit Kapoor) and Pam (Sheeba Chadha). The NRI couple, with ghastly American accents and a ghastlier superiority complex makes Tejas go through a lie-detector test to ensure he is authentically in love with their daughter. When they decide to visit the Patels in Vadodara, the family’s daughter, Tara (Srishti Shrivastava), a gender and sexuality activist who lives with them, managing a long-distance marriage, isn’t the only bristle that could come in the way of this marriage. It is a secret that has been hidden deep beneath Pallavi, whose elegance, poise and efficiency are what keep the family going. For the engagement of Ritwik and Esha, a close family-friend couple of the Patels, Kanchan (Simone Singh) and her husband (Ninad Kamat) land up at the Patel household. Kanchan nurses a secret of her own and the friendship between Kanchan and Pallavi go way back to when they were teenagers.
Maja Ma has no dramatic edge or inventive storytelling.
The screenplay by Sumit Batheja has some pan-India, some quintessentially Gujarati humour. Director Anand Tiwari treats the screenplay without any visual or storytelling ingenuity — the story unfolding more like a TV serial, with plot points fuelling its arc. The central conflict, of how Pallavi will stand up to her family and the Vadodara society that the family is part of, and how it resolves in the end for a neat conclusion gets the short shrift. So, although the story’s message is clearly a subversive one, the subversion appears more as a tool to bring the family together. It is a mild whiff of feminist subversion; the makers seem too cautious to rock the family boat and keeps the anchor of the family that stays together on course in a steely way.
Dixit is her usual luminous self, grace in her dancing as well a dialogue delivery, but not quite emoting the biggest crisis of her life with more than sombreness and quiet dignity — a riff, ultimately, on the Indian housewife, infallible in her commitment to her husband and family. Rao plays his role with the right amount of Everyman body language and dialogue delivery — we’ve seen him in more recent roles like this. A standout scene takes place on an aerial rope transit when the extended family and in-laws-to-be go on a touristy jaunt. Kanchan blows the lid off Pam’s carefully constructed American act of moral and economic superiority — the film’s only stuttering attempt at a rebellion. All the rebellion belongs of Shrivastava’s bull-headed commitment to advocating the right of LGBTQAI+ communities of her hometown.
Maja Ma has no dramatic edge or inventive storytelling. For a story that rests on a devoted housewife’s chance at reclaiming her individuality, it is interminably drab.