Maja Ma movie review: Madhuri Dixit-starrer is cringe fest that’s best avoided

Hyderabad: Madhuri Dixit’s ‘Maja Ma’ seems to have a promising plot, but it falls really short of expectations. One could put it down to a casting fail, but Madhuri as a closeted lesbian doesn’t come close to portraying the complex emotions her character goes through. The film begins with Ritwik Bhowmick’s Tejas getting to ready […]

Hyderabad: Madhuri Dixit’s ‘Maja Ma’ seems to have a promising plot, but it falls really short of expectations. One could put it down to a casting fail, but Madhuri as a closeted lesbian doesn’t come close to portraying the complex emotions her character goes through.

The film begins with Ritwik Bhowmick’s Tejas getting to ready to meet his prospective in-laws as his girlfriend played by Barkha Singh tells him, her parents are just like any other family only a ‘bit different’. We get to know how different they are in the next scene when they make Tejas take a lie detector test to see whether his intentions towards their daughter are good or bad.

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Tejas passes with flying colours. However, the still unconvinced would-be in-laws want to meet Tejas’s family as “marriage means uniting two families”. The glitch in the perfect match comes when Madhuri unwittingly reveals that she is a lesbian to her daughter which is witnessed not only by her whole family, would-be in laws, but also her entire mohalla. The scene is so cringey, it’s almost painful to watch.

Despite their hammy and one of the worst American accents, Rajit Kapur and Sheeba Chaddha as Barkha’s parents pour some life into their cardboard-like characters. Barkha acts well as the girl who is torn between her boyfriend and parent’s wishes. It’s Madhuri Dixit’s Pallavi who poses the problem here. She is unable to fully connect to her character’s demands and appears stiff.

A theme around LGBTQIA needs to be dealt with sensitively, but somehow director Anand Tiwari is unable to push the boundaries and sticks to safe play. The writer could have found another way to introduce the ‘coming out’ part to her family. Subtlety is murdered here as they introduce scenes of Pallavi being taken to fake babas in an attempt to cure her of her ‘gayness’ and taking lie detector tests.

Maja Ma appears to edge the line between progressive and traditional, but is stuck somewhere in the middle with its message. The best part of the movie is Pallavi’s former lover played by Simone Singh who effectively shuts up Sheeba’s hammy accent with the choicest of words in Punjabi. It actually makes up for the cringe fest this movie is.