Film: Kaali Peeli Tales

Cast: Vinay Pathak, Soni Razdan, Sayani Gupta, Priyanshu Painyuli, Sharib Hashmi, Maanvi Gagroo, Hussain Dalal, Inaayat Sood, Tanmay Dhanania, Adeeb Rais, Gaurav Arora, Siddharth Menon, Gauahar Khan

Director: Adeeb Rais

OTT: Amazon Mini TV  

Rating: 2.5 Moons

In the recent months, the Indian streaming space has got cozy with several anthologies over the past couple of years. With anthologies like Lust Stories, Ray, Feels Like Ishq, Ajeeb Daastaans, Navarasa and others the audience have gotten used to being served a plethora of stories with a common theme running through them. Amazon miniTV’s Kaali Peeli Tales also tries the same trope and as the name suggests has the common taxi or Mumbai’s black and yellow cab aka ‘kaali peeli’ as the common thread. However, the cabs are not the scene or backdrop of the tale but just another location for the shorts to feature their climax scene.

Kaali Peeli Tales tries to portray a Modern Love type of stories but the end result is nowhere close to the original. In Kaali Peeli Tales all the stories are about love and portray how the modern-age people try to navigate through the challenges that occur in their relationships. Usually, an anthology has different directors coming together but her we have Adeeb Rais helming all six of them and showcasing different aspects of the Mumbai city. However, he is unable to do justice to them and his treatment soon gets repetitive. A good love story needs to have its moments interspersed with silence, emotions and expressions but in Kaali Peeli what we get is verbosity, over-explanation and every emotion being spelled out thereby killing any feelings that the actors would have wanted to convey to the audience.

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Kaali Peeli has some great cast members like Vinay Pathak, Sharib Hashmi, Sayani Gupta, Priyanshu Painyuli, Maanvi Gagroo, Gauahar Khan and others but they fail to deliver due to the mediocre writing and insipid narrative. Harra Bharra featuring Razdan and Pathak falls prey to the Punjabi stereotype with the characters’ lines giving a hint that they might have been taken from old jokes and WhatsApp forwards. The veteran actors try their best to convey the emotions but the writing is so superficial that their craft falls flat.

Single Jhumka features Sayani Gupta and Priyanshu Painyuli and tries to delve into infidelity without any reasons as to why the character will go through with it. Aashima (Sayani) loses one of her jhumkas, the same night she cheats. Hers is the only character that sits in the kaali peeli alone and introspects. Her beau asks her whether she still loves him and she answers, “Maybe not as much as I used to. But I still love you.” You tend to question what was the moral or the need of the short, what did it want to tell; several of the characters are given dialogues where it is not needed, sapping the love story of its moment.

 Marriage 2.0 has Ashwin (Hussain Dalal) and Malini (Maanvi Gagroo) as a married couple toeing the line of fidelity affair in their relationship. Rais tries to showcase a couple that is comfortable with each other and know themselves inside out with some heightened kitchen sink drama. However, Rais’ overzealous dialogues, random insertions of doubts and unnecessary explanations just don’t work for the short and it fails to create any impact or bring out any dilemma for the characters. This is no Look Back In Anger, it is just plain cotton candy with no substance but too much sugar high.

In Loose Ends, Rais tries to depict homosexual love between Chris (Siddharth Menon) and Karthik (Tanmay Dhanania). The two men are in love but have a backstory where Chris was Karthik’s student in high school. However, this paramount fact is not much delved into. Instead we see a bigger issue in the fact that Karthik is married and his wife (Gauahar Khan) is pregnant. This short might have risen above the rest where infidelity and sexual awakening of a character would have happened but the characters don’t talk to each other to bridge the gap and bring a justified end but instead talk to the audience through the fourth wall. By the end of it, you just want to shake your head and feel that if two men can share a passionate kiss in the back seat of a cab in Mumbai without being jeered or tutted at then this definitely seems to be a scene from a fairytale in some alternate universe and they might just take a grip on their lives and sort out the issues.

Fish Fry Aur Coffee has Sharib Hashmi and Gaurav Arora in the lead where the two actors play ex-conmen, one imprisoned for someone else’s mistake while another for killing a pedestrian after a bout of drunk driving. Both share blissful moments with their lovers over coffee and fish fry after being released from jail but love blossoms when they find each other in the back seat of the same kaali peeli. They speak of the peace they felt in jail and the courage they need to show to survive in today’s world. The short seem highly improbable and exaggerated because coincidence is one thing but too much is something that needs to be cited for and here Rais does not provide any.

Love in Tadoba stars Rais himself as Ankit and Inayat Sood as Rhea. They bring the jingoistic, millennial love between two people who are stars on social media and live their life in the virtual world. With caricaturist portrayals, dated dialogues, overly done plot and over-the-top acting Love in Tadoba is the most insufferable short of the lot. There is just nothing here that redeems the characters in the eyes of the audience, who must have had enough of breaking the fourth wall till now.

Kaali Peeli Tales is too ordinary to binge-watch this week.

PeepingMoon.com gives Kaali Peeli Tales 2.5 Moons.