My Melbourne film review: cultures intertwined

My Melbourne is probably not the same as your Melbourne – but that’s the beauty of it.

Inside a busy St Kilda kitchen, an assistant chef seeks reprieve from her controlling husband. At the dance studio nearby, a young deaf woman longs to feel fully independent. Further away from the city, in a sun-filled townhouse, a gay man attempts reconciliation with his distant father. And in the local high school, an Afghan refugee girl confronts gender stereotypes in cricket.

My Melbourne is an ambitious project which sees four directors take on four different stories in a film connected by one place: the city of Melbourne, which comes with its winding laneways, giant sports stadiums, eccentric cosmopolitan vibes, the famous Yarra River, and a population that varies widely in terms of wealth, gender, ethnicity and ability.

Each of the directors, who hail from India, have interpreted screenplays from Australian writers and melded them together in a film that is well acted, shot and edited – but the ambition behind the anthology film doesn’t quite reach fulfillment as each story strains to be connected to the next.

Watch the trailer for My Melbourne.

The stories of My Melbourne

Nandini – directed by Onir

My Melbourne opens with Nandini, the story of a gay Indian man whose father comes to visit him in Australia for the first time since his mother died. Indraneel (Arka Das, Lion) and his father Mihir (Mouly Ganguly) have been estranged for many years, so the arrival is met with tension.

Mihir has come to complete the Asthi Visarjan ash spreading ceremony, and Indraneel is not expecting much in the way of a tearful reunion or significant father-son healing. His partner has other plans, however, and encourages Mihir to stay and talk more with Indraneel. Queue up some major life lessons to be learned by all.

My first thoughts at the end of this section were mostly about wanting to see more of the characters. Expository dialogue is fine and necessary, but almost everything we know about the characters of this part is from telling us, rather than showing us. The camera work is of a really high standard and should have been used more to tell the visual side of the story.

On top of that, the acting is somewhat stilted, though there is enough being conveyed here to fuel the narrative. Overall, the domestic drama of Nandini at least compelling to watch despite lacking some depth.

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Jules – directed by Imtiaz Ali

Jules follows Sakshi, a young married woman who’s fairly new to Melbourne and works in a St Kilda restaurant. After being confronted by the mentally unstable, rough-sleeping Jules in an alley, she begins to question her decision to emigrate from India. In the meantime, her husband is emotionally abusive and constantly checks in on her while she works.

Written by Arif Ali, Shivangi Bhowmick and Monique Nair, Jules is probably the most compelling piece of the My Melbourne puzzle. It’s got a genuinely meaningful character arc that isn’t pre-empted by its setup, and it features two great leading performances from Arushi Sharma as Sakshi and Kat Stewart, who is quite unrecognisable here as Jules.

A 52-year-old homeless woman with a knack for solving crossword puzzles and a 23-year-old immigrant with a miserable home life and flair for cooking is not a pair you’d expect to see on the streets of Melbourne (or anywhere, really), and that’s what makes Jules brilliant for me.

Emma – directed by Rima Das

Written by Samira Cox and Monique Nair, Emma explores the rampant ableism in this so-called progressive city of Melbourne. 20 year old Emma has always dreamed of being a dancer – but unfortunately for her, her deafness and Usher Syndrome equal industry discrimination and ableist attitudes toward that goal.

It’s not that her family and friends don’t believe in her – they think she’s great and support her at every turn – it’s the wider world that needs an attitude adjustment.

We see Emma in two timelines: when she was a little girl just starting to learn ballet, twirling and skipping on stage, and now, when she is an adult facing the reality of Usher Syndrome symptoms making it harder for her to dance. When Emma meets Nathan, a professional deaf dancer who has found success after making peace with himself and his disability, she begins to regain some of the confidence that came so easily to her as a child.

Like the titular character’s experience with the noisy and frustrating hearing world, Emma is best in its quiet moments – i.e. the times where Emma can be alone to feel the music and dance the way she wants to – but it suffers from a similar shallowness to Nandini, in that we don’t get to know much about her beyond her deafness and her dancing.

Setara – directed by Kabir Khan

Setara is a real go-getter of a girl. Despite being only 15 when she had to flee Taliban rule in Afghanistan and come to Australia with her mother and older sister, she faces the world with endless optimism. A chance to join the local girls cricket team sees her having to choose between being a ‘model minority’ student, and chasing her sporting dreams.

Playing a version of herself, Setara Amiri takes to the screenplay of Setara with gumption. It’s a classic sports underdog story, with the added impact of being a refugee success story too. Even though both sides of the tale are not saying anything new, Setara still has a charm to it that’s impossible to deny.

Australian cricketer Brad Hodge plays the girls’ coach, which might be a nice Easter egg for true cricket fans, but for me the lack of acting experience brought the story to an awkward crawl.

The highlight of this piece, and perhaps of the whole film, comes in the final act, where a wardrobe mishap sparks an unexpected response from the otherwise all-White team of female cricketers.

Though uneven at times and only very loosely connected, My Melbourne is a film that shouldn’t be ignored. I would definitely welcome more ambitious projects like it, especially if they have a little more depth and aren’t afraid to experiment further with the cinematic medium.

My Melbourne is in cinemas across Australia and India now.