Max, Min & Meowzaki

Most urban relationship dramas often confuse emotional honesty with high volume !Writer-director Padmakumar Narasimhamurthy goes the other way. There are no explosive confrontations engineered for applause. No manipulative background score insisting you cry. No characters screaming their feelings because the screenplay doesn’t know how else to express them.The film is entirely deliberate in its rejection of cheap melodrama opting instead to observe a splintered family slowly stitching itself back together. This film has the confidence to whisper. The narrative engine is deceptively simple. Young adults Max (Siddharth Menon) and Min (Medha Shankar) are navigating the messy wreckage of a breakup . As they divide up their shared life one sofa and book shelf at a time the ultimate battleground becomes the custody of Meowzaki, a rescue kitten named after their favourite animation maestro, Hayao Miyazaki. The sagacious feline here is a narrative anchor to explore a tender meditation on grief, loneliness and the different ways people survive both.

A film made four years back, releasing only now, suddenly feels current. Mention of protests and placards woven into the plot around an unravelling couple makes you feel that it’s reflecting the times we are passing through. But then, who is to say that thorny relationships and problem-ridden times aren’t the story of us, decade upon decade? Max (Siddharth Menon) and Min (Medha Shankr), a pair whose relationship is heading south, find themselves connecting over their cat. Or is it just the handsome creature that draws Min back to Max, especially when things aren’t quite as smooth with the new man in her life? The feelings are relatable: if you’ve been together for a while, parting is never easy, and could perhaps encompass residual warmth alongside resentment and sadness.

Against the backdrop of a soft monsoon, Max, Min & Meowzaki unfolds as an elegant symphony of human vulnerability. Waiting in the wings for quite some time, at the heart of this coming-of-age, slice-of-life drama are three generations of single men, each carrying a heavy yet silent sorrow. They are men who have forgotten how to speak to one another. Yet to recover from the death of his mother, jingle singer Mahesh or Max (Siddharth Menon), is negotiating with the wreckage of a love story that has just collapsed into a bittersweet breakup with Minara Hussain, or Min (Medha Shankr). His father, Ramesh (Adil Hussain), a man tightly wound in rigid armour, is suffocating under a sleepless, unconfessed grief for his deceased wife and societal biases. The grandfather, an eminent Carnatic singer, Sridhar (Nassar) navigates the fading twilight of his memories, carrying a guilt of not being able to take his son along in the song of life.

It’s tempting to like a movie like Max, Min & Meowzaki for its many progressive ingredients. The title refers to a young couple and their cat. Or more specifically: a young interfaith couple (‘Max’ is a Tamil-Brahmin named Mahesh and Min is a Muslim named Minara) going through a breakup; they debate the custody of their cat named after iconic Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. The film opens with their ending. Production designer Min (Medha Shankar) is already in a relationship with an older Bengali director she works for. Ad-jingles composer Max (Siddharth Menon) goes on a date with an influencer-coded girl who parrots the language of WhatsApp-university forwards (“there is no such thing as Hindu extremists, okay?”) and right-wing algorithms.