Konkona Sensharma in a still from Mumbai Diaries.
It’s one thing to release films such as Malik and Kuruthi, both of which fortunately slipped under the radar of the wrong sort of people, but Mumbai Diaries is in Hindi, and about an event in our recent history that affected the entire nation. It’s remarkable how Amazon Prime, in the same year that it was dragged through the mud (but not for the right reasons) for making Tandav, has gone ahead and produced something that will surely attract the ire of the IT cells. Sure, it settles for a decidedly preachy tone towards the end, but when the sermon is so rooted in humanism, certain concessions can be made. Despite falling for the ‘Good Muslim Trope’ and routinely hurling a grenade in subtlety’s face, Mumbai Diaries has its heart in the right place. The show wastes around two episodes on this make-believe nonsense, and concludes with a 35-minute episode that functions as little more than a pointless postscript. Why it chooses to make a swing this wild is unclear, especially because it was landing all its punches already. In a move that could either be described as bold or breathtakingly foolish (you decide), Mumbai Diaries, towards its latter half, decides to deviate from documented facts, and swagger into a Tarantino-esque revisionist history zone. Their increasingly intense confrontations over the course of the turbulent night come to a head in a scene so laughably over-the-top that you’ll wonder if you should admire the audacity of the storytelling or roll your eyes at Advani and co-director Nikhil Gonsalves’ simplistic take on a decades-long conflict. Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the Taj hotel (they’ve named it something else here), Dr Oberoi's wife Ananya is caught in the middle of a siege.Įasily the show’s biggest achievement is how well it fleshes out not just Dr Oberoi and Chitra Das - it helps that Raina and Sensharma deliver deeply felt performances - but also minor supporting characters like the security guard Vasu, and Samarth, a hospital handyman whose simmering bigotry boils to the surface in the aftermath of the attacks.Īfter suffering a grave personal loss, Samarth lashes out against the wet-behind-the-ears resident doctor Ahaan Mirza, entirely because he’s a Muslim. The terrific pilot episode also introduces a trio of freshers on their first day at work, a passionate social worker named Chitra Das ( Konkona Sensharma, phenomenal, as usual), miscellaneous policemen (both bent and honest), a harried boss who must maintain order at a time of crisis, and scores of patients in need of medical attention. Essentially a One Long Day story set during the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11, the eight-episode drama feels expansive in scope, but is largely restricted to the fictional Bombay General Hospital’s emergency room, led by the brash doctor Kaushik Oberoi (Mohit Raina).
Mumbai Diaries’ sensibilities, as with all of Advani’s work, are staunchly mainstream, but there’s an air of sophistication to the filmmaking that we don’t often see in homegrown streaming projects.