She
Cast: Aditi Pohankar, Vijay Varma, Vishwas Kini, Dhruv Thukrali
Directors: Arif Ali, Avinash Das
Better not to judge Netflix’s new Hindi web series She right away. It is layered and may not have the same meaning on the second watch. There is also the possibility that this is all a pointless exercise and that it is actually a superficial show.
Showrunner Imtiaz Ali’s India original has a chawl-dweller female police officer Bhumika Pardeshi (Aditi Pohankar) at the helm of things. One day, a crime cop Jason Fernandez (Vishwas Kini) sees her and decides to use her for an undercover operation.
As part of the schedule, she dresses up as a sex worker and wanders the side streets of Mumbai hoping to catch a big fish. Vijay Varma’s Sasya turns out to be the first to grab the bait, but the directors – Arif Ali and Avinash Das – decide to give it a spin.
Bhumika, whose husband continues to complain that she is not sexually proactive, discovers a new side of her personality during the meeting with Sasya, and from then on decides to use her sexuality to survive in work and in life.
The show gives the impression that a woman’s body could also act as the chain to control the developments around her. We keep meeting saliva-dripping brothers-in-law and flirtatious boyfriends, but none with much writing support. At certain points everything starts to look really surreal, which makes you wonder what happened to the docile girl who is afraid of the world.
Read: Asur webshow review
Read: Inside Edge 2 web show review
This could also be a way of judging the character transition from the main female, but all of this is done in such a way that you worry about the tangential drift of the plot. The credit goes to Pohankar for never leaving the basic features attached to her character that somehow keep us informed of the undercover cop’s story.
It also pretends to be a thriller, as characters keep emerging from the darkness. Here Vijay Varma arrives in style and then slowly falls victim to the makers’ nonchalance. They set up a premise and leave it to sloppy writing and mostly disjointed plot points.
There are scenes that indicate that she is very indulgent, as if Ali and his comrades are determined to talk about a ‘different kind of ordinary woman’. You know, the kind a femme fatale can be in a salwaar kameez. We have seen different versions of such women in movies and shows where sometimes they are seen from a rural or semi-urban background with big Bollywood dreams but end up in B movies.
Pohankar’s Bumika is, in a sense, the urban-poor version of the same. She finds her mojo in her sexuality and wages a war against men without any sense of politeness.
In fact, the show seems more nuanced when Bumika gets scenes with her sister and mother. There is a certain sense of comfort during such interactions.
But whatever smoothness is achieved through such communication is lost in the next, when we see Bhumika indulging in strange conversations with beggars, homeless people and undercover cops.
She usually suffers from the wrong idea of a powerful woman, but there is something: no one in the show takes Bhumika for more than her face value, which means that she is not the usual girl with new ideas and strong self-image, but an ordinary one. woman looking for a better life. If this is the case, the creators may have a justification for her actions. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate well on screen and remains a mystery.
The first season of She is not very impressive.
Rating: 2/5
Interact with Rohit Vats on Twitter/@nawabjha