Musafir means traveller. Someone who is in your life for a stretch, and then is not. Musafir Cafe hangs that word over a café in the hills, spends eight episodes on the people passing through it, and keeps its attention on the one man who never does. It's slow, unglamorous, considerably sadder than its warm surfaces let on, and it stops rather than ends.
Two people walking in opposite directions
Chander Mohan Sharma (Vikrant Massey) is a software engineer carrying a café around in his head and no intention of risking anything on it. Sudha Tripathi (Vedika Pinto) is a lawyer who does what she wants the moment she wants it, and who's on her way to a firm in Mumbai. They meet in Bhopal at an arranged-marriage introduction neither of them is taking seriously, and they turn out to be extremely good for each other.
Which is the trap. Watching someone live without asking permission is what turns his café from a daydream into a plan, while she moves steadily towards the structured city life he spent years escaping. Adapted from a Hindi novel, the show is patient enough to let that cross happen across hours rather than announce it.
They hand each other the thing that carries them apart.
The second timeline picks him up eight years on in Mussoorie, running the café, with Preeti (Mahima Makwana) beside him. Both halves run at once, so the warmth of one is always sitting next to the cost of the other.
It is much funnier than it looks
The best sustained stretch in the season is a comic one, built around a mother arriving unannounced at a flat where two unmarried people are very obviously living together. It's domestic and precise, and everyone plays it as the particular horror of being an adult and still getting caught.
It also has consequences, which is the part that matters. The comedy is wired into the plot rather than parked beside it, and the funniest scene in the show is the one that quietly costs the couple something they wanted.
The camera stays on the faces
Nothing here is fancy. The camera work is competent rather than distinguished, and the whole thing is built at a scale a well-funded web series could manage. What it has instead is patience, holding on a face well past the comfortable length until you're inside the thought rather than watching someone have it.
Vedika Pinto gets the hardest version of that and lands it, playing a woman agreeing with her mouth and dissenting with everything else.
Nobody here is dressed up and nobody is lit kindly. That reads as budget for about two episodes and then resolves into the argument. These are middle-class people with dreams they work towards and never quite arrive at, and the show wants them to look like the audience watching.
What the season does not finish
The eighth episode doesn't land. It arranges its pieces, introduces a new one and halts on a reveal built to sell a second season rather than close this one. Four hours of runtime is enough room to finish a story this size.
The plot itself is familiar. A man, the woman he lost, and the woman he lives with now isn't a new shape, and this one brings little to it that hasn't been there before.
What it brings is everything inside the shape. The modesty that limits it as a production is exactly right for the story it tells, and the show never entirely escapes the smaller half of that bargain.
A 3.5, Glowing. Give it your whole attention and it pays you back in full; leave it running while you do something else and there's genuinely nothing there. Come to it in the evening with tea, on a night with nowhere to be.
Like the people inside it, Musafir Cafe spends its whole season believing there will always be more time. The tragedy is that there isn't.
The diary. Sudha (Vedika Pinto) finds Chander's (Vikrant Massey) notebook, where the café is still only a plan, and writes Musafir across the top of the page. The title of the show is her word. He has spent eight years opening a business every morning that says it back to him.
The email. She turns down the Mumbai offer, sends it, and looks over at him asleep. The dream is postponed rather than cancelled, quietly, by email, with nobody in the room to watch her do it. That distinction matters later, because she does eventually go.
The lodge. They land at a guesthouse run by an older unmarried couple who have built a whole life without any of the paperwork. It is an outrageous coincidence and it works anyway, because it hands them a look at the future immediately before it is taken off the table. He sees the alternative and still wants the certificate.
The fight. He offers to give up the mountains and follow her to Mumbai, and she can see the twenty years of resentment sitting at the end of that. So she ends it to protect him. Then he tells her she was using him and calls her ambitions nonsense, after seven episodes of her pushing him towards his. That asymmetry is the thing the show refuses to smooth over.
The phone call. Drunk, to her mother, with her listening on the line. It is the lowest thing in the series and it is what makes the apology in the finale necessary rather than sentimental.
The sweater. Preeti (Mahima Makwana) sees a jumper of his and goes to pieces without warning. She has always known there were three people in that relationship. She misses him while he is standing in the next room, and she has been choosing it consciously the entire time, which is far sadder than not noticing.
The reservation. The last scene puts a stranger at the desk asking after a room booked in his partner's name, and the partner is Sudha. It is a good closing shot and a cheap closing note, and both of those are true at once.
Bright Bulbs
- Vikrant Massey plays a man being unfailingly polite to his own life, and lets you see the part of him that is never quite in the room.
- Vedika Pinto's Sudha never gets punished for putting her career first. The writing treats that as clear-eyed rather than cold.
- Tea is a real motif rather than set dressing. Cooking and tending do the work grand gestures usually get handed.
Dull Bulbs
- A whole season of patient investment gets cashed out for a cliffhanger, the one moment the show stops respecting the attention it asked for.
- Preeti (Mahima Makwana) is short-changed. The season's most devastating scene belongs to a character the writing barely funds.
Cast
- Vikrant Massey as Chander Mohan Sharma
- Vedika Pinto as Sudha Tripathi
- Mahima Makwana as Preeti
- Adil Hussain as Mark
- Rajeev Siddhartha as Rahil