Based on Divya Prakash Dubey’s book of the same name, Musafir Cafe has some very affected storytelling. (I used to call it Instagram storytelling or post-it-note filmmaking, but that’s a bit uncharitable in this context). Like a teenager who’s imitating all their favourite movies, the series is sweet and naive in equal measure. The whole thing seems to be influenced by pop-culture of the mid-2010s. The cinema of Imtiaz Ali looms large over the tale of Chander and Sudha: her Jab We Met-style persona (she’s from Ratlam too), their Socha Na Tha-style meet-cute, his Tamasha-style conundrum (a nine-to-fiver jolted out of settled ways), his Love-Aaj-Kal-2-style circumstances, his suppressed dreams of a mountain life, his small-town approach to heartbreak and companionship, and so on. Their arrangement sprouts out of the most movie-character moment. She randomly moves into his place after fighting with her flatmate, and suddenly they’re a live-in couple. They barely know each other, but she does it cutely, so I suppose it’s fine.
There’s a bit of Meri Pyaari Bindu in their differences and her manic-pixie aura, a bit of Haseen Dillruba in his angst and disillusionment. Their conflict is internal and gendered — Sudha treats love as a compromise of hard-earned identities, Chander treats it as a bargain to belong. There’s a dollop of La La Land as well — in the background score; in the way she names his future cafe; in the trope of how the most important relationship is often the one that doesn’t last. Preeti is the equivalent of the woman Sebastian probably dates after his Happily Never After with Mia. But she’s a solo explorer who’s sacrificed her own restlessness to be with him; a handsome admirer keeps reminding her of the wings she’s clipped off.
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