In Musafir Cafe, a new Indian romantic drama on Netflix, a man falls for a woman who has vowed that marriage isn’t for her, and years later finally finds love with a strong, but more reserved woman. But his heart is still with the one that got away, and his current love knows it.
MUSAFIR CAFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “MUSSOORIE. Present Day.” A woman walks out of her house, tightens the laces of her shoes and walks into town. She greets a friend who is taking a hike with her boyfriend and finds out he’s going to propose to her.
The Gist: Preeti (Mahima Makwana) is on her way to the Musafir Cafe, which she runs with her husband, Chander Mohan Sharma (Vikrant Massey). “For every traveler, your journey begins when you find your true companion. Sometimes, that companion stays by their side. And sometimes, they leave after changing them forever,” we hear her say in voice over. She thinks that Chander is her true companion, but she knows he thought of that when he met Sudha (Vedika Pinto).
We flash back eight years to the city of Bhopal. Chander is sitting at a cafe waiting for an arranged first date. He is so particular about his coffee order that he tells the waiter to just bring him ground coffee and hot water of a certain temperature. As he makes his coffee, he hears a woman rejecting a date at another table. When he calls his date’s phone, he finds out that his date, Sudha, and that woman are one in the same.
He doesn’t seem to be put off by it. In fact, the two hit it off pretty much right away and spend hours talking. Chander went to college in the U.S. but came back to India because there was an emptiness in America; he finds his career in logistics to be boring. Sudha is a divorce attorney who loves her job. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to get married but goes on these dates to satisfy her matchmaking auntie.
They cross paths again when they are both on dates that aren’t going well; Sudha gets Chander out of his date by telling the woman that he’s a no-good sex addict. Chander finds himself enchanted by this woman who doesn’t act like any of the women he’s ever known, but also seems to accept that it’l never happen between the two of them because Sudha wants her career more than a marriage.
Meanwhile, back in the present day, Preeti is finding that a regular customer of the cafe named Rahil (Rajeev Siddhartha) is giving her gifts and showing her attention that she finds interesting, despite her relationship with Chander.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Sharanya Rajgopal and based on the novel by Divya Prakash Dubey, Musafir Cafe seems to have equal parts of Virgin River and This Is Us.
Our Take: There is much more going on in the first half-hour of Musafir Cafe than we realized, and we actually had to go back and confirm what we saw. One thing that we did realize is that the timeframe goes back and forth between the present day, with Chander and Preeti together, and eight years ago, when Chander and Sudha are trying to figure out just what they are together. The only way we can really tell the difference is that present day Chander has a beard and past Chander does not.
Another influence we forgot to mention in the section above are films like Garden State and (500) Days Of Summer, where a woman comes out of nowhere and turns a man’s life upside down, making him see things about himself he never did before. That, folks, is the classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, which was defined by our colleague Nathan Rabin way back in 2007. We’re going to spend the season watching Chander fall for Sudha then get his heart broken, then find love with Preeti, with Preeti somehow not angry that while Chander has affection towards her, she knows his heart is with someone else.
It’s an intriguing triangle (a quadrangle if you count Rahil in the mix), but it’s couched in a lot of romantic comedy style. Lilting music, Preeti talking about traveling companions, and lots of soft-focus shots of everyone. What we want to find out is if the realities of these relationships are going to come to the fore or if everything is still going to be offset by the show’s romantic trappings.
Performance Worth Watching: Vedika Pinto infuses Sudha with a fierceness and a sense of fun that we don’t tend to see in Indian dramas.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Sudha has Chander come get her from her apartment, where she had just broken up with a boyfriend. She tells the cab driver to take them to his place.
Sleeper Star: We’re enjoying the scenery of Bhopal and its surrounding, hilly area, and that’s thanks to the show’s cinematographers.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Shall we go watch someone else’s story in the dark?” Chander asks Sudha when they go on a Monday date to a play, of all things.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While there’s a lot about Musafir Cafe that feels a bit cliche, the show has a relaxed vibe that makes it easy to watch, especially when you finally figure out which timeline a scene is in.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.