Made In Heaven 2 review: Not quite as path-breaking as the first season but eminently watchable

Sobhita Dhulipala in a still from Made in Heaven 2, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

“It doesn’t matter if they are true or not. It’s an ideal the world needs,” Kabir Basrai, the poetic voiceover of Made in Heaven, says at the end of an episode in the show’s new season. It’s a marriage ceremony, set on the banks of the French Riviera, an episode that also accommodates meta humour about sending films to Cannes. It comments on the idealism of the elite, the image of austerity they circulate and the prize of privilege that they hold onto. It’s this idea of rumoured perfection that elite weddings - as maybe elite film festivals - between stars and starlets, maybe stand for. An idea that though only partially true, serves the greater purpose of satisfying, benevolent untruths. In its second, much delayed season, Made in Heaven expands a familiar cast, itemizes their conflicts, somewhat plays it safe, but remains bewitchingly watchable.

Directed by Reema Kagti, Alankrita Shrivastava, Nitya Mehra and Neeraj Ghaywan, this seven-episode season brings back the fire-fighting duo of Karan (Arjun Mathur) and Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala). Both are now trying to run their somewhat rogue but dogged wedding planning business out of an old Delhi house that belongs to Jauhari, the foul-mouthed goon played in the first season by Vijay Raaz. Tara and Karan are still assisted by Kabir (Shashank Arora) and Jazz (Shivani Raghuvanshi). Joining them is Meher, an empathetic transperson looking for an equally kind lover, and Mona Singh as Bulbul, the benevolent but restrictive new auditor (also Jauhari’s wife). Jim Sarbh and Kalki Koechlin revive their roles as Adil and Faiza, as the couple who have cheated on Tara. Adil is locked in a divorce battle with Tara, while Karan must confront the sight of his cancerous mother urging him to get married despite having come out of the closet. Both grapple with intimate conflicts that threaten to reveal sides of them they’d rather not offer to the world. Sides we’re coached to meticulously hide within the folds of moments that qualify as eccentricity.

Also read: Made in Heaven actor Arjun Mathur: ‘Bollywood has caught the wrong note in depicting gay characters’

Like the first season, multiple threads unravel over the course of this second season. Jazz and Kabir have their ongoing tryst with the borders of romance and infatuation. Tara’s ordeal as the one left astray by Adil and Faiza’s affair, turns into a complicated battle. There is an extended life for Adil’s own little family feud concerning a sizeable family fortune and a long-held family secret – much of which feels beside the point. Karan’s decline into an anarchic, messy teenager after he is thrust into a place from where both return and retribution seem impossible, is a thing of disconcerting beauty. Mathur is exceptional again as the toiling, crumpled heart of a show that shows him little mercy. It’s a burden he picks up with a softness and fragility that seeps into the bloodstream of the show. He is the shape, ache and longing inevitably take in Made in Heaven.

The Jauharis are offered a life of their own here, as possibly the only middle-aged couple the show has chosen to follow deep into their drawing room. Parents to a rebellious, wayward teenager, they must find that elusive balance between harsh shadowing and respectful distance. Raaz, previously the acidic, uncultured tongue of the show, is somewhat mellowed down to a progressive, but mysterious doer of things. It’s a transition that feels intriguing, but also somewhat undercooked. As if there was a conscious effort to soften the coarse skin of a show that though set among the English-speaking elite, momentarily tumbled into the raw, unvarnished gullies of a savage India. This firm transfer from impoverishment to the arena of privilege robs the show of its spiky quality, which came from forcing worlds into contemplating the existence and extremes of the other.

Like the first season, the second adopts the structure of rifling through a marriage per episode. The roughly hour-long episodes juggle between the show’s main characters and the marriages they must fix, solve or paper over. Domestic abuse, racism, caste, greed and more colour the canvas of a series that summarizes the hypocrisy of the Indian elite. With a floating array of star cameos that include the likes of Neelam, Sanjay Kapoor, Pulkit Samrat, Radhika Apte, Anurag Kashyap and more Made in Heaven has also become the closest thing to prestige streaming - the kind of show that everyone wants to cozy up to as a signature, woke turn contrasting the wider canal of Hindi cinema and entertainment. Not everything designed to provoke, however, lands. Radhika Apte’s role as a Dalit intellectual feels a bit forced rather than organic. It isn’t exactly sloppy, but it doesn’t inspire either.

In its second season, Made in Heaven has found that comfort zone where a character can stroll through the scenery of a foreign land, and utter its beauty without the use of a word. It’s artsy in an obvious way, but also ethereal and moody in a way few stories in our ecosystem can pull off. It’s also the kind of comfort zone, where you tend to build on your world with agreeable, but ultimately unstimulating characters. People who, rather than poke the constitution of your idealism, simply fold into its accommodating slits. Where compassion becomes a kind of comfort as well. It’s probably why the show feels safer, maybe even softer, in a season that intends to spread warmth, rather than instigate the search for its absence. It’s not as path-breaking, edgy or as earnest as it felt the first time round, but it’s deftly layered, exceptionally designed and exquisitely put together.