'Metro… In Dino' Movie Review: Anurag Basu Finds Chaos in the Calm

Nobody expected Life in a… Metro (2007) to come from the director of Murder and Gangster. It was Anurag Basu’s first non-Vishesh Films venture after four ero-mantic (erotic+romantic) thrillers in a row. Its music composer, Pritam, was known for the chartbusters of Dhoom and Gangster. They were already commercially successful, but it never felt like they were the “makers”. More like hit-creators for hire: executors of someone else’s aesthetic. Until Metro, which became a breaking-free moment of sorts. The inspired multi-narrative drama marked the first real flex of voice for both writer-director and composer. There was a sense of exploration and discovery in the way the film unfolded — the city of Mumbai being a storyteller (with a ‘live’ band), and its many lives, the stories.

18 years later, its spiritual sequel Metro… In Dino is no longer seeking as hard. It is an Anurag Basu Film and a Pritam Musical; they are the storytellers and the story. Its multiple cities and lives are the medium. The legacy is there, as is the baggage. The authorial stamps are there: characters speaking in Jagga Jasoos-coded song, conflicts descending into Ludo-coded chaos, heartbreaks draped in Barfi-coded silences, fictions posing as heightened reality. It’s more ‘Movies in a… Metro’ than life in it. The result is a bloated (159 minutes are a lot), overdesigned and occasionally poignant film whose identity is consumed by labels rather than places or people. It has that trademark Basu-Pritam trait: when it works, it really works. But when it doesn’t, it’s like watching a star athlete hindered by the pressure of their own talent. There’s also the timing. The hyperlink rom-com reaches for whimsy and volume to offset the anthology fatigue that peaked during the pandemic. It tries to be inventive in treatment and tone — and sometimes it is — because most themes of modern love and marriage have been exhausted.

Metro… In Dino updates the narrative strands of the first film. Every generation has an arc, almost as if different phases of one life are disguised as different lives in one country. First, the ‘young adults’. Commitment-phobic Delhi casanova Parth (Aditya Roy Kapur) crosses paths with Chumki (Sara Ali Khan), a ditzy corporate slave who is essentially a male fantasy of a “bindaas girl”; she behaves like a caricature and thinks like a human. Parth’s buddies are Bangalore-based couple Akash (Ali Fazal) and Shruti (Fatima Sana Shaikh), who are basically Imtiaz Ali characters forced to exist beyond the end credits. Akash’s man-childness is acting up: he wants to resign and pursue his music dreams, so they get into a bitter long-distance marriage that’s supposed to involve an abortion.

Then the ‘golden oldies’. Chumki is engaged to a colleague because she aspires to be like her middle-aged sister Kajol (Konkona Sen Sharma) and old mother Shibani (Neena Gupta). Little does she know that their marriages are like social media accounts — people see only what they choose to show. Mumbai-based Kajol is on collision course with husband Monty (Pankaj Tripathi), who has set sail on an extramarital dating app. And Pune-based housewife Shibani yearns to attend her Kolkata college reunion — where she might meet ex-flame Parimal (Anupam Kher) — despite her husband’s (Saswata Chatterjee) objections. Parimal spends his days worrying about holding his young and widowed daughter-in-law (Darshana Banik) back; she refuses to leave out of a tragic sense of loyalty to her late husband. There’s also Kajol’s 15-year-old daughter, who’s anxious and confused about her sexual orientation. Her parents’ spat doesn’t help matters.

What Basu’s quirky post-Barfi pitch does is stage artificiality — the performative nature of marriage; of infidelity; of adolescence and sacrifice — as social subtext. Kajol and Monty’s dating-app escapades feature them pretending to be other people; he’s influenced by his frisky colleagues, and she’s almost waiting to catch him red-handed so that their monotony is punctured. She wants to see how far he goes, but she subconsciously hopes to rediscover their stakes. I like the idea behind their crisis: they realise that falling out of love is a harder performance than staying in love. Akash has to put on an act of ambition to earn Shruti’s respect; Shruti has to suppress her own desires and temptations. The teenager pretends to be ‘normal’. Most of all, Parimal pretends to be a difficult man — even roping Shibani into his ‘scheme’ — to drive his daughter-in-law away to greener pastures; cruelty becomes his (secret) love language. The only characters close to being authentic are, ironically, the ones who don’t know what they want: Chumki and Parth, the kind of loose cannons that would make uptight uncles shake their heads and go “youngsters these days (in dino)".

Most of these situations are exaggerated, frivolous even. Even the dubbing sounds off in some scenes. But they hint at a deeper curiosity about human relationships: the chasm between how we think and what we say. When Chumki starts to see the truth of her family, her disillusionment is based on the premise that every partner has “adjusted” and nobody is happy. She’s the only one in the position to alter her future before she enters it — a reflection of how we craft identities not on our own terms, but as a reaction to the histories and traumas we inherit. She thinks she can avoid the mistakes of her elders, but the film’s choice to normalise their fate — and look for acceptance within it — suggests that everyone is interconnected (like the format of the film), whether they know it or not. The ensemble cast is fine, because they buy into Basu’s loud appropriation of reality. It lets them get away with excesses: especially Sara Ali Khan’s portrayal of mellow and Ali Fazal’s depiction of rage. But even within these parameters, Konkona Sen Sharma is leaps ahead, simply by virtue of how she can switch the tone of the entire film with a single gesture.

A still from 'Metro In Dino'

The frustrating thing about Metro… In Dino is that it refuses to quit while it’s ahead. After a lively setup, the film just drifts along in the second half without accomplishing anything substantial (other than vibes). The Jaan-E-Mann-styled ingenuity fades. Monty and Kajol get stuck in an aimless loop of punishment and farce on a reconciliation trip; any promise of something edgier — like roleplaying or swinging — dies a swift death. I can’t figure out where Chumki is heading, emotionally or otherwise. Parimal and Shibani, too, look like they’re trapped in a garish skit that has no third act; he even spells out his guilt and nobility. As is often the case with multi-arc movies, one track suffers the most: here it’s Akash and Shruti, whose sadboi limbo reduces them to cameos in their own storyline. Each of them goes around in circles, biding time to soften the viewer with easy entertainment.

Basu’s visual language and colour palettes are striking on the worst of days, but here it flattens every city into one entity: the Mumbai rains are indistinguishable from the Delhi pubs, Kolkata flats and Goa hotels. The atmosphere is generic, even if the look is not. The musicality turns every other phase into a montage, which is nice at first, until it starts to feel like a 1990s indi-pop video going rogue. The impression is deliberate, given the ‘franchise’ trope of Pritam and the band popping up in public places, urging us to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. The soundtrack itself is efficient, not effervescent. It has more of an impact if heard in context of the film. That’s a sign of a decent Bollywood album, but it lacks the earwormish quality of Alvida, O Meri Jaan and In Dino from the 2007 film, which provoke in isolation as much as they invoke in sequence. The rock ballad Dil Ka Kya almost gets there in the pre-interval stretch, merging the momentum of a background score with the intensity of a playback song.

Every now and then, though, a stray note of perfection emerges. Like the riff of an electric guitar syncing with the image of a broken wife telling her husband what a loser he is. Or the glimpse of a widower willing to invite loneliness and rupture the traditional narrative of caregiving. Or a crestfallen woman accusing her mother of ‘settling’ for a thankless life in front of the men that erased them. Or a couple mentally reading texts with each other’s inflections. Or even the vintage rom-com formula of a station dash — and an indecisive proposal. These moments are the why-we-go-to-the-movies moments. For a split second, nothing else matters. It’s a little like that classic shot in Ratatouille, where the taste of a common dish yanks a dour critic back to his childhood; it reminds him of why he fell in love with food. Anurag Basu assembles these bites more than any contemporary Hindi director. Even at his most forgettable, he makes us remember.