Rating : ⭐️ 1/2
Genre : Drama
Year : 2021
Running time : 2 hours 12 minutes
Director : Laxman Utekar
Cast : Kriti Sanon, Pankaj Tripathi, Manoj Pahwa, Supriya Pathak, Evelyn Edwards, Aidan, Whytock
Kid rating : PG
Mimi (Kriti Sanon) is a poor girl with dreams of becoming a Bollywood heroine. Getting there will be expensive though, and she has no way to pay for all the expenses. So when an American couple, Summer (Evelyn Edwards) and John (Aidan Whytock), approach her to become a surrogate mother for their child, she agrees – the money is good. However a major, unexpected crisis in early pregnancy will truly test her resolve.
I haven’t see the Marathi original so the storyline, to me, was completely unpredictable. That’s the good; unfortunately there was a lot of bad – the gaping plot-holes, the poorly sketched characters, the complete lack of logic. Mimi is about a surrogacy, but deals with the subject in a very shallow manner. I can see where a girl strapped for cash might accept surrogacy, but all the situations surrounding the pregnancy are pretty unrealistically shot.
Mimi, at first repulsed by the idea of surrogacy, warms to it once she realizes the amount of cash involved. Then she accepts it almost gleefully. Her naïveté shows when she asks the doctor about stretch marks and the effect of pregnancy on her figure, and the doctor (who apparently does not live in the same world we do) replies with the most ridiculous unconcern: “Did Shilpa Shetty’s figure get ruined”? Indeed. Because our lives are so similar to Shilpa Shetty’s.
Kriti Sanon is a misfit in this role. She seems too cosmopolitan to play a small-town girl (a problem I’ve pointed out before in Bareilly ki Barfi), and the Rajasthani accent on her seems almost laughable. However since this film can’t make any grand claims to realism anyway, she does pass muster. A greater pity though is the abysmal wastage of actors like Supriya Pathak and Manoj Pahwa. Pathak just appeared in another 2 bit role in Toofaan; it’s a pity that great actors like her can’t land solid, meaty roles.
Pankaj Tripathi plays his character ably, but can’t make the jokes land. I would like to see more of Sai Tamhankar – she plays Mimi’s good friend Shama, and does an excellent job.
Mimi is also very regressive. The all-suffering, self-sacrificing mother trope is trotted out. Abortion is painted as a sin. Mimi wants to keep the baby at all costs, but shows no strength of resolve to take on her conservative parents and society in general. She gives up on her dreams and resigns herself to motherhood – all with copious tears, rending of her beloved movie posters and grief – a true show of powerlessness. Her poorly sketched character is a mix of tearful emotions mixed in with an unreal naïveté and flippancy.
The character of her parents is badly wrought as well. These “good” people have the perspicacity of blind bats. They moan about their Hindu daughter having married a Muslim man, in front of her closest friend Shama, a Muslim woman. And then they turn around and accuse her (Shama) of having broken their trust!
While this film’s characters are portrayed as small-town, simple, golden-hearted people who wouldn’t harm a fly (unless it wasn’t a good, moral, girl-fly), they exhibit pretty bigoted, backward-looking qualities. Their attitudes turn on a dime, one moment they are wailing and beating their chests about the shame and dishonor, the next they’re smiling with acceptance.
On the whole, Mimi is an overwrought, overdone mishmash of unrealistic emotional drama. Substandard scripting, ridiculous dialogs, and the general regressive tone of this caricature of a film makes Mimi a poor watch.
Kidwise: An “item number” with suggestive dancing. Talk of conception/reproduction and 1 scene of a woman in labor, although we only see her face. More damaging that all this was the portrayal of sexism, racism, colorism and women without agency.
