In a mask, she looks like everyone else. It’s not her city or country, but it’s her home now. The Pune native goes about her daily routine in Tokyo: walking, thinking, dodging other feet, commuting to work on the metro. It’s muscle memory; you can tell she’s been here for a while. The only sounds she hears are of footsteps shuffling, metal doors opening, vehicles moving. Voices stay within; speaking is impolite. And then she sees him, after 7 years, looking perplexed on a platform. In a mask, he looks like the man she loved. They meet at a famous intersection. When they hug, it’s like the moment activates human motion; hundreds of walkers cross the congested street the second their bodies touch. They spend the next few days enjoying the familiarity of an ex-partner in a foreign environment. Everything is new and old at once. She shows him the place; they eat, stroll, run, giggle, puncture the silences, get drunk together. It’s everyone’s Before-Sunset fantasy. But it escalates quickly. When they kiss, it’s like the moment activates faster human motion; a speeding train darts behind them the second their lips meet.
The first ten minutes of Mohit Takalkar’s Toh Ti Ani Fuji (Main Woh Aur Fuji) are intoxicating. They’re right out of a “movie” movie. The film-making evokes the kind of incomplete love story in which serendipity — a chance meeting; a second chance — reunites a former couple. The setting encourages a sense of surrender. The background score sounds like a darker plucky-string riff on the In The Mood For Love theme: like forbidden hearts finding each other in an alternate universe. The implication is that they were soulmates until something tore them apart. In most stories, the “something” is beyond their control: external factors, villains, circumstances, missed signals, bad luck. From the way they hold (onto) each other, it seems that they should have been together. She’s a translator, yet he is the one language she struggled to interpret. They communicate and laugh and sigh in Marathi, so the intimacy is both personal and geocultural. It’s clear that this Tokyo tryst will be juxtaposed with their history; we will see who they were, how they met, why they loved and lost. As a viewer, we are conditioned to root for them. We expect to see a young and formative tragedy — one that earns another shot at a happy ending.
But the novelty of Toh Ti Ani Fuji is that it resists the conventional relationship between love and storytelling. It chooses to explore the ugly contradictions of reality while posing as fiction. Once the previous timeline begins, it unfolds like a slow-burning revelation. The Pune flashbacks slowly alter our perception of the Japanese reunion. The more we see of their past, the more loaded — and tense — the present feels; we go from rooting for their newness to wondering how they’re even being civil with each other. That’s not to say they went through something exceptional as youngsters. The remarkable thing is that they are revealed as just another passionate couple who gear through stages of abuse that are often romanticised by mainstream Indian cinema. For better or worse, “toxic” is a subset of “intoxicating”. The chaos of the rich-boy-cool-girl arc consumes the movie we thought we knew, and the quiet ex-lovers arc plays out like it’s apologising for what happened.
What emerges out of this unsettling link between the past and the present (or the present and the future) is the ambivalence of the phrase “time heals”. Healing is not always recommended; scars are sometimes the only evidence of one’s ability to bleed. A glimpse of the man and woman in Japan suggests that they’re in a right-place-right-time situation; nothing about them suggests that they were once destructive and emotionally incompatible. He now looks stable and centered; she looks mature and calmer. But the cracks and edginess appear every once in a while, like souvenirs of a buried trip — especially when they find themselves drawn to each other despite the permanence of their wounds. They remember the past differently, but the flashbacks don’t behave like memories. It’s like the two periods are in conversation, in debate. The characters may be older and wiser, yet they remain connected by the very time that severed that connection.
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t judge them for considering each other’s company after all they went through. It doesn’t scold them for softening. She rebuilt her life from the pieces of their wreckage, but his re-entry is not framed as a moral touchpoint. It would be simpler to do that, given the political correctness (or wokeness) of love stories featuring man-children and the apologists who nurture them. It would be simpler to show that it is not advisable for them to revise their feelings, rekindle a spark and forget their trauma. But the writing challenges our notions of the difference between toxic love and failed relationships. They are finally equipped, after all those years, to process the consequences of the fallout. The more we see of Pune 2014, in fact, the more Tokyo 2021 becomes an against-the-odds phase — where the two people who broke each other are reshaping each other as familiar strangers. The question posed is difficult: who are we to decide if two tamed hearts deserve another chance?
The film is neither promoting nor dismissing their actions. She isn’t bound by our beliefs about feminism; he isn’t bound by our reading of redemption. They’re just allowed to be. The film also forces us to confront a few uncomfortable truths about gender dynamics. She is shown to be someone so attuned to caregiving — first to a dying mother, then a juvenile boyfriend, then a son — that she knows no other form of companionship. It’s almost as if she cannot love without the crutch of responsibility. When he appears in Japan as a functional adult, she is liberated from this cycle of attachment as a function of control. It’s a fascinating take on how even the most intimate emotions are defined by the constraints of social identity. They meet again when they are no longer limited by these constraints, which is why it’s such an unvarnished account of human nature. It ceases to matter if they’re right or wrong, strong or weak. It’s rare for a relationship movie to acquire the depth and complexity of a coming-of-age drama.
The craft of the film supports its unnerving ambitions. I’m usually wary of international co-productions and reverse-engineered locations, but I like the way Japan is woven into the story as a character. Particularly the metaphor of Mount Fuji as a “dormant volcano” and “visible from everywhere,” pertaining to the central relationship: an exotic tourist destination, but with a simmering personality within. Some of the visual transitions supply the screenplay — like a scene of her having to bathe him because he has a fractured hand from a tantrum match-cutting to a shot of a sulking child being washed by a parent in Tokyo. I also like that the colour tone is similar across both timelines. It’s hard to tell the switch in periods, which plays into the motif of how people tend to perceive spaces as an accumulation of experiences. The disorientation brings us closer to the (nameless) couple’s perspective. Some of the subtext in the staging is neat, too. The young couple discuss their dreamy future at one point — plans of marriage, a house, an independent life, a happily ever after — while we hear news coverage of Arnab Goswami declaring the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in the background.
The lead performances play a big role in grounding the film. Lalit Prabhakar does well to let both versions of one man bleed into each other, but without letting our impression of one influence the other. It’s a tricky balance; the authenticity of the older guy is tethered to the unhinged boy he once was. It’s like he’s the hero of two separate movies until he realises they’re related. The star of the film, though, is Mrinmayee Godbole, who navigates the difficult task of playing a woman who has evolved without changing the essence of who she is. She pulls it off without subscribing to a crowd-pleasing transformation or girl-boss payoff. She is many things at once: warm, stubborn, fragile, strong, docile, demanding and maternal. She allows the film to live in the uneasy void between closure and continuity, love and resentment. As a result, Toh Ti Ani Fuji captures the conflict of watching something that’s both dangerous and beautiful. After all, there’s nothing like distance to process the spectacle of lava. There’s nothing like time to realise that the tectonic plates of love — like the Earth’s crust — are solidified by magma.