Directed by: Bornila Chatterji and Alankrita Shrivastava
Streaming on : Netflix India
Cast: Pooja Bhatt, Shahana Goswami, Amruta Subhash, Plabita Borthakur, Aadhya Anand, Manish Chaudhary, Vivek Gomber, Rahul Bose, Danish Hussain, Imaad Shah, Sanghmitra Hitaishi, Neel Raj Dewan, Nauheed Cyrusi, Ekavalli Khanna, Prashant Singh, Rituraj Singh, Rio Kapadia, and others.
Never judge a book by its cover or so they say, though the teasers and posters of Bombay begums could well give it a leftover Four more Shots Please vibe, it’s not that bad. Leaving the now out of steam feminazi brigade this show certainly had some high points particularly the handling of a sensitive subject like sexual exploitation at work place (not new on the celluloid but better dealt with here).
The director duo had a good strong storyline but except the sexual harassment episode there’s nothing else extraordinaire about this web-series and that’s such a let down.
Set very obviously in the big bombastic city of Bombay the six episodic series deals with the lives of four women who are battling patriarchy, rivalry, exploitation and competition bravely or that’s how it’s being portrayed. Rani (Bhatt) is the CEO of a bank titled the Royal bank of Bombay (lol title no?) who’s in denial of the onset of menopause, facing gender discrimination at workplace and trying to forge relationships with her stepchildren. There is Fatima (Goswami, brilliant) a second in line at the bank dealing with an Abhimaan kind situation with her lesser profiled husband (Gomber, super impressive).
Also in the picture is a fresh recruit Ayesha(Borthakur) coming to Terms with her sexuality and a victim of sexual harassment at work. The quartet is completed by Lily(Subhash) a prostitute eager for rehabilitation.
The directors have done an impressive job with the episodes dealing with sexual harassment at work place, a horror present across all corporates and not well depicted in Hindi movies or series as such, somehow the scenes look believably realistic here. Then the three Ms - Menopause, Masturbation and Menstruation are openly depicted and appear naturally well executed.
But that’s about it. These factors can’t really uplift an otherwise weak screenplay and presentation of the events on screen. In almost all the scenes the four strong women are shown smoking, drinking alcohol and unapologetically cheating on their respective partners, sorry that doesn’t count as empowerment especially when the partners are shown loyal and loving. There’s so much rethinking and reanalysing that was much needed by the director duo. There’s certainly a big line of demarcation between feminism and feminazi.
Of the star cast Goswami takes the cake, the bakery and the baker, she hogs the limelight with a remarkably brilliant act, her role is messed up, badly written, bad dialogues just about everything sucks but her performance is mind blowing, not an easy task for an actor to infuse oxygen into a dead role. 90s problem child Pooja Bhatt returns after a two decade long break, she acts well and has been attired ethnically with classiest sarees but those love making scenes with Bose look weird like a giant (Bhatt) mating with a dwarf (Bose).
Rest of the cast (except Gomber) are just about fine like sleepwalking through their roles.
Though nothing great or exceptional this web-series is somewhat better than Four More Shots Please or those Ekta Kapoor fake feminazi series that keep popping up on zee5. ⭐️⭐️
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