The release of Bombay Talkies in 2013 to mark 100 years of Indian cinema legitimized anthology filmmaking for Hindi moviegoers. Ever since, several iterations of four shorts stitched together around a running thread have made it to our screens telling us stories of ghosts and lust, hurt and heartbreak.
At 118 minutes, My Melbourne follows in the footsteps of Modern Love. It allows us a glimpse into the lives of four people on the cusp of self-actualization, bound by their marginalized identities and Melbourne, the Australian city they have found a home in.
Inspired by true incidents, the quartet of films (each titled after a pivotal female character) cuts through class, race, sexuality, disability and gender to show how severely displacement—no matter its form—colours the human experience. Amid snaking buses and the constant din of a metropolis relentless in its pursuit, cinematographer Brad Francis paints a city that’s expansive enough to not just accommodate diversity but let it thrive.
Nandini
Directed by Onir along with William Duan, this first installment follows Indraneel (Arka Das), a gay Indian man, and his estranged father who is visiting him to honour the last wish of his recently-deceased wife.
No women feature in this short and yet it’s titled Nandini. We’re never expressly told that it was the name of Indraneel’s mother, a woman whose absence manages to achieve what her presence never could. But we know it nonetheless because certain truths don’t need spelling out. Arka Das and Mouli Ganguly are luminous as two men using shared loss and grief to find a way to each other again.
Das will remind you of Pratik Gandhi’s career-defining turn in a similar role in Baai from Modern Love Mumbai (2022). The prickly father-son dynamic is not too dissimilar from the recent The Mehta Boys. The uncomfortable silences and corrosive divergences that even time has failed to lull belong to the same universe of familial haunts and aches as Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin’s Goldfish (2022).
Nandini has sparse dialogue. Just tight closeups, a massive churning of emotions and scenes that speak volumes without saying anything at all. In one, Indraneel quietly rubs off his nail polish, erasing a part of his identity to make himself more palatable to his father.
In another, he sheds copious tears into his dead mother’s s