Mumbai Love suffers from a severe misunderstanding of what makes a Bollywood picture work. It seemed to aim for a Bollywood movie's length, but it failed to give the plot a Bollywood scope, filling that extended runtime with an excess of frivolity. Since its premiere, the film has been cut down from its torturous, nearly three hour runtime. But its current form is still far too long for its meager ambitions. It's certainly an improvement from the original cut, but the end result is still pretty tedious.
The film concerns a young Indian man named Nandi (Kiko Matos), who was raised in the Philippines. His parents are setting up an arranged marriage for him, but he's resistant to that idea. One day he meets Ella (Solenn Heussaff), a Filipina in Mumbai for business. They spend one day together and promptly fall in love. But before they can meet again, Ella is abruptly sent back home. With no means to contact her, Nandi travels to the Philippines to look for her.
There isn't much to this story. The film doesn't really do much to sell us the relationship between its two main characters. Their bond seems to be based entirely on physical attraction, the characters hardly given any real challenges to overcome together. It mostly has them smiling at each other a lot, the film at times resembling a toothpaste commercial. Despite all the pronouncements of love, there is no depth at all to the relationship. The romance is so uninteresting that the movie seems to forget about it for long stretches.
In a couple of these stretches, the film attempts to draw attention to how Indians are perceived in Filipino society. There's a major subplot that seems designed almost entirely to sing the praises of the five-six loan system. It's kind of an interesting thing to explore, but the film does so with no sophistication. Once again, there is a severe lack of conflict, the film sketching out a utopia of completely ethical moneylenders who seem to give out money out of the goodness of their own hearts. While the film actually has room for it, there’s no mention of what exactly happens when one of these loans doesn’t work out.
Some of the film's ideas are funny, but it's all buried under the weight of the film's length. It is considerably shorter than when I had first seen it, but it still feels pretty long. Individual scenes are still poorly paced. And the lack of conflict makes every passing minute feel like a waste. Performances are affably enthusiastic. Heussaff and Matos are both appealingly game, and they look good together. Small turns from Ronnie Lazaro and Jun Sabayton provide a couple of genuinely funny moments.
Mumbai Love could probably stand to lose another twenty minutes or so. There just isn't enough plot to sustain the film's length, even in its currently shortened form. There is indeed some joy to be found in all this frivolity, but it's terribly difficult to find it amidst the film's sense of excess. It feels exhausting after a while, the film having run out of things to say, yet refusing to end.
My Rating:
—
Image used in home stream taken from official Mumbai Love: The Movie Facebook page.
