Imagine Poo from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum in the Instagram era. Now imagine the same Poo being someone who can topple and expose someone like Arnab Goswami in a prime-time news debate. Can you sense a sharp contrast in the tone? Created by Ishita Moitra and directed by Collin D’Cunha, the latest Amazon Prime Video original Call Me Bae is an attempt to blend both these worlds, but the glossiness and “expensive” poverty of the characters are so on your face that the intention might remind you of Paathal Lok, but the execution just looks like Emily in Paris.
Bella Chowdhary, aka Bae, whose social media handle is @callmebae is our central character. She is married to Agasthya Chowdhary, and the Chowdharys are filthy rich. Long story short, the abandonment Bella felt in the marriage made her cross the lines, eventually resulting in the separation. Her own family also disowned her, and she was forced to move to Mumbai for a restart without the support of anyone. How that journey goes for Bae is what we see in Dharmatic Entertainment’s Call Me Bae.
It is not like the issues faced by women and sister-code narratives always need to be done using darker treatment with a lot of misery on screen. We have seen the iconic “getting on the bus” scene from Sex Education, and it was even discussed during the latest Me Too wave in the Malayalam film industry. The reason why Sex Education worked on that level was because it was not designing characters for convenience. Despite the characters living in a totally different setting, there is an emotional relatability in the writing of that show. Forget Sex Education, the Zoya Akhtar-Reema Kagti movies also featured the rich people. But they also worked because the character’s struggle had parallels with everyone watching those movies. The recurring Poo-ification of Bae is so annoying that it just stops the series from evolving.
There is this character named Saira Ali in the series who helps Bella get a place to live initially, and eventually, she becomes her roommate. That character actually had a lot of scope, in my opinion. In the earlier episodes of the series, Saira reveals that she uses dating apps like Air BNB when she has to find a place to crash for a week’s time. I mean, it felt more like a plausible middle-class girl’s struggle in a city like Mumbai without family’s support. But the focus of Call Me Bae is on Bae, and she is that delusional Gen Z girl. The series finale has major things happening, like big names getting called out on live TV, exposing the breach of privacy, etc. But those scenes looked so shallow because our central character is still in her Poo zone with very little evolution happening to her thinking process.
Knowing how good she was in Kho Gaye Hum Kahaan, a movie that has Ananya Panday playing a social media validation-seeking girl, her underwhelming performance in Call Me Bae feels like a result of the way the series was treated. There are countless moments in the series where you would feel that the character’s delusional phase is over, and the very next moment, the script would put her back in the K3G space. My favorite character and performance in the whole series was that of Saira Ali, played by Muskkaan Jaferi. The character felt more rooted in reality, and even in the bits that were quite filmy and exaggerated, Muskkaan performed the actions of that character effortlessly. In fact, that character’s obsession with betting generates more empathy in us when compared to the kleptomania of the leading lady.
Vir Das plays the caricature version of Arnab Goswami as Satyajit Sen, and he never felt like an intimidating figure. Gurfateh Pirzada gets to play the ethical journalist with a “boring” sense of fashion. Niharika Lyra Dutt plays the second bestie of Bae, Tammarrah, and Varun Sood is the naive, motivating guy with abs and vulnerability. Lisa Mishra, Sahil Shroff, Vihaan Samat, etc., are the other names in the cast, along with a slew of cameos, including names like Karishma Tanna and Sayani Gupta.
As I already mentioned, the finale of this show has these women empowering themes along with lessons on ethical journalism. Even if you forgive the shallowness of the staging of all those unconvincing “hacking” bits, there is this irony of Bae becoming this sensational “journalist” simply because the ethical journalist Neel Nair saw her drunken rant about the “sensationalist” journalist Satyajit Sen and thought she could be a part of his team. That is the basic problem with Call Me Bae. It has all these politically sensitive themes taking it forward, but it is also set in a world where Kamaal R Khan can be the entertainment editor-in-chief of a major news channel.
It has all these politically sensitive themes taking it forward, but it is also set in a world where Kamal R Khan can be the entertainment editor-in-chief of a major news channel.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
