Prime Video has taken an unconventional approach to marketing its first Indian Amazon Original film, the musical drama Maja Ma, starring Bollywood royalty Madhuri Dixit Nene. Prior to releasing the first trailer on Thursday, the streamer debuted a colorful music video that teased the festive tone of the film.
Maja Ma tells the story of a middle-class woman named Pallavi (Dixit Nene), whose perfectly constructed familial life begins to fall apart in the days leading up to her son’s wedding. The film is directed by Anand Tiwari, who previously worked with Prime Video on the music drama series Bandish Bandits. He also directed the romantic comedy Love Per Square Foot for Netflix.
Maja Ma reunites him with his Bandish Bandits star Ritwik Bhowmik, who plays Tejas, a “regular guy” from small-town India. Tejas seems to resent his father, who isn’t as educated as he is, and is at constant loggerheads with his sister. But he adores his mother. He is also concerned about not getting along with the family of the woman he is about to marry. Her family happens to be comparatively wealthier than his own, which sets up some class-divide conflict. In India, as the trailer says, “marriages are between families,” and not just the individuals getting hitched.
But matters take a grave turn when a mysterious video of Pallavi goes viral, which throws a wrench in Tejas’ planned wedding. This is when Pallavi takes matters into her own hands and declares that she is more than a wife, a mother, and a daughter; she has an identity of her own, and she’s going to leave no stone unturned in getting the wedding back on track.
Maja Ma, in many ways, appears to be geared toward a global audience. And this makes sense, considering that it’s the first Indian original film that Prime Video has produced; the streamer has, of course, released loads of Indian films in the past, but those were acquisitions. Maja Ma is exactly what Western audiences would imagine Bollywood movies to be — colorful, dramatic, and filled with elaborately choreographed musical numbers. A more mainstream Monsoon Wedding, if you will.
It doesn’t hurt that Dixit Nene is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. An icon of ‘90s Hindi cinema known for her dancing skills, Dixit Nene quit the movies and settled in the U.S. with her family for several years, before returning to India and re-starting her acting career over a decade ago. She made her streaming debut earlier this year with Netflix’s thriller series The Fame Game. To international audiences, she would perhaps be best known for the BAFTA-nominated drama Devdas, also starring Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.
Maja Ma also stars Barkha Singh, Srishti Shrivastava, Rajit Kapur, Simone Singh, Sheeba Chaddha, Malhar Thakar and Ninad Kamat. The film will be released on Prime Video on October 6. You can watch the trailer and music video here, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
