The underbelly and the flat belly
Wash, sanitise, disinfect, try to breathe through a mask. Cook, click, eat, click, post, comment, check likes, repeat. Read, watch, attend Zoom parties, drink, chat. Repeat.
Trapped as we are in front of our screens — our only window to the world — there are days when it feels like we are being made to participate in an extended, disquieting final episode of Black Mirror where we have to not just live our lives on a loop, but must also observe ourselves as almost robotic characters in this new virusinduced reality.
Mostly we manage to do this with an anaesthetised, quiet exterior, even though we often hear an ear-bursting wail inside.
I sometimes feel a full-blown existential crisis brewing inside.
And then I wonder, how has life come to imitate art. And when it does so, when the reality is so peculiar and mind-bending, must art cut close to the bone, or should it offer an escape, another world to live in?
I an still looking for the answer. But luckily, just as my patience with Netflix’s slick mediocrity is beginning to wear thin, other streaming sites seem to be bucking up.
There’s Mubi, of course, with its fabulous curation of artsy world and Indian cinema. But also Amazon Prime, Disney Hotstar and Zee5 which are not just offering serials, but movies as well.
Disney Hotstar has eight films by the Spanish master director, Pedro Almodovar, including Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Volver, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and All About My Mother. It also has the entire filmography of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose films are moving metaphors of life in Iran by a director who has spent most of his life under house arrest and whose films remain banned in his country. On June 12, director Shoojit Sircar’s Gulabo Sitabo, starring Amitabh Bachc han and Ayushmann Khurrana will premiere on Amazon Prime.
The film is about “two slimy scheming foxes in a game of oneupmanship, each one attracting other members to their clan and each one with an agenda of his own”, the press release said.
I didn’t quite get it, but I didn’t care either.
Amitabh Bachchan looks different, grumpy and Khurrana is reuniting with the writer (Juhi Chaturvedi) and director of Vicky Donor after years. I am looking forward to it.
Though the release date of Shakuntala Devi (Hindi), with Vidya Balan in the lead, is yet to be announced, after her warm, affecting role as an ISRO scientist in Mission Mangal, Ms Balan as Shakuntala Devi the “human computer” should be fun to watch. The biopic of the extraordinary mathematics genius is being directed by Anu Menon whose directorial debut in 2012 (London Paris New York) and the Naseeruddin Shah-Kalki Koechlin film, Waiting, were sweet but insignificant.
But before these two films arrive on our small screens, on May 22, Zee5 will release Ghoomketu, starring Nawazuddin Siddiquie as a writer and Anurag Kashyap as a cop. The film also has Amitabh Bachchan, Sonakshi Sinha and Ranveer Singh in what the release claimed are “interesting cameos”. Written and directed by Pushpendra Nath Misra, Ghoomketu is produced by Kashyap and his pal Vikas Bahl who was “cleared” of sexual harassment charges levelled by a former female employee of Phantom Films.
The charges were first made public in 2015. In 2019, an internal committee headed by Dipa Motwane — the mother of Bahl’s pal and former Phantom Films’ business partner, Vikramaditya Motwane — gave him a clean chit.
So all is well now and the boys are back to working together again.
PAATAL LOK (Amazon Prime)
Cast: Jaideep Ahlawat, Neeraj Kabi, Gul Panag, Abhishek Banerjee, Swastika Mukherjee, Ishwak Singh, Jagjeet Singh, Asif Khan, Mairembam Ronaldo, Niharika Lyra Dutt, Bodhisattva Sharma, Manish Chaudhary, Rajesh Sharma, Anup Jalota, Loveleen Mishra
Director: Avinash Arun & Prosit Roy
Rating: ★★★★
Paatal Lok, a riveting crimedrama about cops, police investigation, politics and power games, dropped this Friday and is already a huge hit, with a fan following that is growing. It deserves every bit of the fawning, and more.
Especially its excellent, accomplished ensemble of actors, led by Jaideep Ahlawat, an actor who made an impression in the opening sequence of Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), and has finally got a role that he could sink his teeth into.
Paatal Lok, produced by Anushka Sharma, is written by Sudip Sharma (who also wrote Udta Punjab, NH10) and directed by Prosit Roy and Avinash Arun (who had directed the beautiful 2014 Marathi film Killa).
Its sharp screenplay, hell bent on showing us the horror of our reality as is, draws its events and mood from our world, from stuff happening around us.
The plot and characters are quite obviously based on Tarun Tejpal’s book, The Story of My Assassins, though the credits don’t mention it.
Paatal Lok opens when an anonymous tip is received by the CBI and a crime that was about to take place is averted. Four men are arrested — Hathoda Tyagi (Abhishek Banerjee), Tope Singh (Jagjeet Sandhu), Cheeni (Mairembam Ronaldo Singh) and Kabir M (Aasif Khan) — and there are no clues except the target. That is Sanjeev Mehra (Neeraj Kabi), a star-journalist and TV anchor.
The case is assigned to Hathiram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat), a beat cop, and his junior officer at the thana, Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh), who is preparing for his civil services exam.
The case is very important to Hathiram. Not just to get a longoverdue promotion, but to also prove his worth to himself.
As he begins the investigation, different worlds and their characters come into play. There’s the CBI and its officers who walk with an officious, haughty air that’s heavy with their own compromises and rot within. Then there’s the media and its divas.
It’s a web where everyone seems to be a pawn, and it’s not really clear who is pulling the strings. Only two people seem to be who they are
— the lowly cop and the lowly criminal.
As Hathiram and his junior follow leads, trace the lives and motives of each accused, the trails leads them away from the cities, into a labyrinth of back stories in villages where caste hierarchy and land disputes are settled by rapes, and dalit uprisings can be nipped by a beheading.
The village is not a place of idyllic charm. It is often more violent and lawless than the cities and pivots on the terms and whims of upper caste men for whom women and their bodies are simply like games of knots-and-crosses drawn in the mud.
As Hathiram progresses, the focus narrows to three men and their lives — the cop, the criminal and the journalist. We see them in their personal spaces — something that has now become standard for all crime stories and police procedurals, from Trapped to Mindhunter.
There is Hathiram’s dimpled wife Renu (Gul Panag) and their son Siddharth (Bodhisattva Sharma) struggling to survive.
In a lovely bungalow there’s Vikram’s dog-loving wife Dolly Mehra (Swastika Mukherjee) and in office a reporter, Sara Matthews (Niharika Lyra Dutt).
Hathoda Tyagi’s only link with the outside world seems to be with one Masterji.
As it is all still unraveling — the politics of investigation, the corruption and compromise of media, leads suddenly going dry, people turning up dead, screw ups — all answers are found in men with ISI links, Pakistani passports, maps, weapons, ammunition, jehadi literature, assassination plots. And for it all to make sense, “Batla House” is thrown into the mix.
Paatal
Lok is determined to show us an ugly India that is getting uglier.
While at one level it shows us a vivisection of Delhi where relationships are forged not between people but between the power they wield, the favours they can pull, it also shows how a nation’s taste for violence is growing more murderous, and is slowly moving from the dusty our villages to cities.
While there are some direct references to certain horrific incidents — the assassination of Gauri Lankesh, a lynching on a train — Paatal Lok’s main characters are amalgamations of many. Instead of pointing at just one, they point at the rot within the crumbling pillars of democracy.
Paatal Lok is relentless in showing the rising bigotry that now runs through the veins of our sarkari institutions, how words like “inki community” are no different or less threatening than the chants of “mandir yahin banayenge”.
Paatal Lok is not for the tender-hearted. It is abusive, relishes gory violence and is generally crass. But, as the suspense and tension build up to unbearable levels, you can’t help but binge watch it.
Paatal Lok has a huge cast and everyone is excellent, especially Neeraj Kabi, Gul Panag, Abhishek Banerjee, Swastika Mukherjee. They all inhabit their characters and spaces with an ease I haven’t seen in our serials for a while. But Jaideep Ahlawat leads the large without missing a beat. It’s as if he
i s
Hathiram Chaudhary.
PANCHAYAT (Amazon Prime)
Cast: Jitendra Kumar, Neena Gupta, Raghubir Yadav, Faisal Malik, Chandan Roy, created by Deepak Kumar Mishra Rating: ★★★
If Paatal Lok is all about bigbig, bad-bad people and incidents, then Panchayat is about small-small baatein, petty-petty politics.
Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) is a city boy who is studying to clear his CAT and pursue MBA from a prestigious institution. But he is doing so while working as the secretary of village Phulera’s panchayat.
Phulera is a relatively prosperous village where Manju Devi (Neena Gupta) is the village pradhan, but it’s her husband, Brij Bhushan Dubey (Radhubir Yadav), who is the acting pradhan. He attends meetings, takes decisions, while she cooks and worries about her daughter’s marriage.
Abhishek Tripathi is mostly irritated with his job, the bare, basic office, the village, the villagers, the heat, the mosquitos, and he doesn’t really care about anything except getting into a business school. He’s just waiting it out, dying to go back — to his life, his friends. But life in Phulera may be slow, but it’s not without petty politics and big egos.
How, at times, the smallest, simplest things — a chakkewaali chair, for example — can lead to power-play and politics. Written by Chandan Kumar and directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra, Panchayat casts a lenient, almost indulgent eye on corruption and pettiness in panchayats even as it takes a peak at what lies behind the government’s headlines and claims — 33 per cent reservation for women in panchayats, electrification of villages, sarkari schemes and slogans. How they come undone.
Often because of grouses, slights, personality clashes.
The show, which follows the slow pace of life in the village, has an excellent ensemble of actors and the characters, with each episode, grow on you, including the man who at every meeting is always the first to grab food. Neena Gupta brings some star power to it, but it’s really Jitendra Kumar and Raghubir Yadav who hold the show.
I love the show’s signature tune that accompanies the credits. It’s peppy with an oldworld club feel to it.
FOUR MORE SHOTS PLEASE! (Amazon Prime)
Cast: Sayani Gupta, Bani J, Kirti Kulhari, Maanvi Gagroo, Lisa Ray, Milind Soman, Neil Bhoopalam, Prateik Babbar, Simone Singh, Amrita Puri, Shibani Dandekar Direction: Nupur Asthana Rating: ★★★★
Season 2 of Four More Shots Please! doesn’t disappoint. Like Season 1, it’s pacy, fun, good-looking and fails the Bechdel test (whether two women talk to each other about stuff other than men) repeatedly and so robustly that it now has a special place reserved in the family tree of Sex And The City.
Four More Shots Please! or 4MSP is inspired by Sex And the City — the 1998 show in which four friends in New York regularly meet for lunch/dinner/drinks to discuss their love lives, work, bodies, desires, romance, men, babies and, well, sex — as well as Lena Dunham’s Girls that was very funny and had, among other actors, Adam Driver and Riz Ahmed.
4MSP is about four girlfriends in Mumbai who mostly meet in a bar owned by Jeh Wadia (Prateik Babbar) where they have repeated shots of intoxicating beverages and then indulge in high jinx behaviour.
There is Damini Rizvi Roy (Sayani Gupta), an investigative journalist who quit her job last season and is now, to induce a bit of real politics into the show, writing a book about a judge who is killed before delivering an important judgment.
She has a true love and a sexy stepney.
Then there’s Umang Singh (Bani J), the trainer who has gone from being bisexual to gay. She’s still in love with the star Samara (Lisa Ray) who now wants to play ghar-ghar.
There’s also Anjana Menon (Kirti Kulhari), a lawyer and divorced mother, who is facing blatant sexism at work and quits her job to pursue both professional and personal desires.
And then there’s Sidhi Patel (Maanvi Gagroo), the single child of a wealthy couple who does this and that, including modest stripping for horny strangers, has accepted her weight but is waiting for the world to get over its body-shaming and pursuit of a warped notion of beauty.
All these girls have lives, professions, desires, but above and beyond all this substantive, meaningful stuff, they are pretty and have chic, fashionable, expensive wardrobes.
“It’s aspirational,” says stylist Aastha Sharma who, along with her all-women team, has styled the show’s characters since it began. She says her brief for Season 2 was to push the style quotient higher.
From Aastha I learn that the show has come under some criticism and online bitching for being all about fashion and sex, thus, frivolous.
That hardly an original sin. And, well, it’s no sin.
4MSP is just following Sex And The City’s template — of style, story, plot — while locating its characters in a different time, different place, with minor deviations and a little more melodrama.
Season 2’s director, Nupur Asthana says this fashion-forward look was something she inherited (Season 1 was directed by Anu Menon), and that if she had to do it herself she would have done it differently.
Nupur, who directed Mahi Way — a 2010 Yashraj show about a big girl, her ambitions, desires, life — doesn’t see a problem with having a character like Sidhi, who is all about accepting her body, slamming diets, body-shamers, challenging the notion of what’s sexy and beautiful, while constantly reinforcing through all the show’s other characters the idea of perfection. They have rampready body, flawless skin, perfect hair, and clothes that we see only in centre-spreads of glossies. Nupur, who sounds like a candid, straight-shooter and uses both the F-words a lot, says that she was “careful not let the clothes distract from the emotional journey of the girls” and then talks with impatient irritation about the criticism the show has attracted.
It’s not all about glamour and sex, because there are only four minutes of making out in this season, she says and then brings up the long F-word, feminism.
“My show is 100 per cent feminist.”
Okay. But I, for example, have no recollection of what happened in Season 1 except that the girls drank a lot, had fights with their boyfriends, amongst themselves, there was lots of making out, including with Dr Aamir Warsi (Milind Soman), and in a gym.
In this season too there’s binge drinking, faltu talk, dirty talk, bitching about life partners, stumbling in life, getting up, and paid sex.
The show breaks some taboos, sure. But that’s really not why it’s the No. 1 show on Amazon Prime, as Nupur proudly says, twice.
It’s doing very well because it’s pacy, good looking, fun. Because its glamour quotient is very high, and because everyone always looks good, even while puking.
And of course there’s a connect with the girls — they are nice, decent and have problems that are common and many girls and women can relate to. Cheating, settling into a divorce, extramarital affair with a man who says he has an open marriage, a wedding with a diva who can’t see beyond herself, the body accepting unsatisfying sex while emotions remain aloof.
The show is sensibly written, with characters who have many shades of grey. There are bold steps and big losses. And it works because it’s like a good gossip session with a friend, or flipping through a really good issue of a glossy fashion magazine.
It’s a guilty pleasure, like eating a bucket of ice cream. It doesn’t nourish us, but it gives a lot of pleasure.
The criticism, I agree with Nupur, is silly and misplaced. To which she says, “It’s a great chapter in Indian feminism”.
Behen, thoda zyada ho gaya. Just have a shot, please.