Mimi (2021) was always going to end in a bitter custody battle and tearful epiphanies and a moment of self sacrifice. It's a movie about surrogacy, so the only real question is whose tears, whose epiphany, and who makes the sacrifice in the end.
John (Aidan Whytock) and Summer (Evelyn Edwards) are an American couple who have traveled to India in search of a surrogate mother for their eventual child. They've tried working through a surrogacy agency, but Summer and John decided that those girls were too weak; they want a strong mother in order to bear their perfect, healthy child. (Does it sound creepy when they put it that way? Yes. Yes it does.)
Their driver, Bhanu (Pankaj Tripathi) is sympathetic; he and his wife Rekha (Atmaja Pandey) have been trying for a baby for years, without success. He's happy to help the Americans, especially when they offer him a large sum of money to help them find a surrogate.
And then, at a hotel in Rahahstan, they see Mimi (Kriti Sanon) dancing, and realize that she's the one; Mimi is tall, graceful, and well fit - she's exactly what they've been looking for. Bhanu makes a clumsy attempt at explaining the situation to Mimi, and gets slapped for his trouble. However, Mimi wants to go to Mumbai and become a Bollywood star, and to make the move she's going to need a great deal of money, so she reconsiders, and finally agrees.
The deal is that Mimi and Bhanu will be paid in healthy installments during the pregnancy, with the bulk of the payment coming after delivery. The procedure is a success, so John and Summer pay for the first five months and then leave. Rather than explain the situation to her parents (Supriya Pathak and Manoj Pahwa), Mimi tells them that she's been hired for a film shoot on a cruise ship, and she'll be back in nine months. Then, disguised in a burka, she goes to stay with her friend Shama (Sai Tamhankar), posing as Shama's cousin while Bhanu plays the part of her husband.
Everything is pleasant domestic comedy, filled with humorous misunderstandings and the lighter side of pregnancy, until suddenly it isn't. During one of their visits to India, the doctor takes John and Summer aside and tells them that tests indicate that their perfect baby may have Down Syndrome. They can't handle the idea, so they tell Bhanu that they don't want the baby anymore and flee the country.
In the chaos that ensues, Mimi leaves the house without her burka, blowing her cover. She returns to her family home, Bhanu and Shama in tow, and when her parents tearfully demand to know who the father is, she panics and mutely points at Bhanu, leading to a whole new set of wacky misunderstandings. The baby is finally born healthy and very, very white, and Mimi falls in love with the boy. The family settles into an uneasy equilibrium until Bhanu's wife comes looking for him, and the whole truth comes out.
And then everybody decides to act like grownups and they make the situation work. Mimi names the baby Raj, and by the time he's four (and played by Jacob Smith) he's surrounded by a loving extended family. Mimi has gone back to work as a dancer, and occasionally Raj joins her in her shows. One clip makes it to Youtube, and Summer and John happen to see Mimi dancing and realize just who the perfect and very, very white child dancing with her must be, so it's off to India and the inevitable bitter custody battle and tearful epiphanies.
Mimi tries very hard to be a representative of conservative Indian family values, but at the same time, it's pitting a nuclear biological family against a found family of misfits consisting of a single mother, her parents, her Muslim friend, and a taxi driver and his wife, and the movie is very firmly on Team Misfit. The intended moral, the explicitly stated moral, is that parents are vitally important but they don't have to be related to their children by blood (so consider adoption!) but the movie follows up on that premise by introducing a strong and loving family that is completely nontraditional while still superficially resembling a traditional extended family. It's family that's important, and it doesn't matter what it looks like.
No comments:
Post a Comment