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Maharani review: Huma Qureshi tries her best, but SonyLIV's hollow show is over-plotted yet underwritten
Maharani review: Huma Qureshi tries her best to instil some life into Subhash Kapoor's unfocused dramatisation of Bihar politics. But it falls apart rather quickly.
By Rohan Naahar
UPDATED ON MAY 28, 2021 08:26 AM IST
Back within the 90s, filmmaker Joe Dante was hired to write down and direct a movie adaptation of The Phantom comics. He turned in his script, but mere weeks before production was alleged to begin, the project was scrapped for budgetary reasons. Dante dropped out, and a few time later, the studio decided to proceed without him. When he finally watched the finished film, Dante was shocked to get that not only had they retained his script, but that everybody involved had apparently missed the very fact that it had been written as a spoof.
This anecdote highlights a few of very interesting things about filmmaking; firstly, how two directors can take the precise same screenplay, and supported their sensibilities produce entirely different movies. And second, that always times, the impulse of the unimaginative is to play it straight.
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And that is that the fatal flaw with Maharani, the new political drama starring Huma Qureshi, released on Sony LIV, just every week after we all saw the actor, wasted during a thankless role, in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. With no tweaks whatsoever, an equivalent script could’ve been made into a stinging satire of Indian politics, but because it stands, the show may be a mess of ideas that frustratingly never coalesce.
The 10-part series, of which seven episodes were provided for preview, derails so spectacularly round the halfway mark that were creator Subhash Kapoor the railway minister, he’d are fired from the cupboard on moral grounds alone.
I’ll get to Kapoor during a moment, but now looks like the right time to say that the show is, a minimum of partially (but absolutely not), inspired by the lifetime of a person who once upon a time was, in fact, the Union Minister for Railways. Like Bheema Bharti, the fictional chief minister within the show, Lalu Prasad Yadav also appointed his wife, Rabri Devi, as his successor when he sensed the walls closing in on him.
A similar situation unfolds in Maharani when Bheema (Sohum Shah) is rendered invalid after an assassination attempt, creating an influence vacuum at the centre of Bihar politics. during a move that leaves his rivals stunned, he names his wife, Rani, the new chief minister.
She is presented as this dewdrop of purity during a ditch of corruption — an uneducated ‘angoothachhap’ woman who has been deliberately kept out of the general public eye by her husband, perhaps out of a way of protectiveness, but presumably because he feels ashamed of her.
Her transformation from a village bumpkin into a force to be reckoned with is so rapid that it almost seems like it happens between episodes. What took Claire Underwood six seasons in House of Cards takes Rani perhaps six minutes. So we’re treated to tone-deaf fish-out-of-water sequences during which Rani, clueless and completely inexperienced, attends her first cabinet meeting begrudgingly, because she’d much rather tend to her cows back home. But a mere two episodes later, she’s issuing orders just like the three-term CM her character is seemingly, but absolutely not, based on.
A still from Maharani, starring Huma Qureshi.
A still from Maharani, starring Huma Qureshi.
And that’s only one of the various ways during which Maharani feels massively underwritten. It’s too preoccupied with inserting random obstacles in Rani’s life to truly develop her as an individual . Kapoor rampages through the story with the main target of 1 of her bulls, set free inside a stable.
A subplot involving a ‘ghotala’ is introduced, out of the blue, in episode four. A random ‘baba’ drops by in episode five. And suddenly, you get the sense that even the show has gotten bored of its own heroine.
And that’s not Qureshi’s fault in the least . The actor tries her best to elevate the uneven material, but the show’s tone is as unreliable as a party-hopping ‘neta’ — it can transition from broad comedy to shocking violence during a matter of minutes. Her accent, a minimum of to my untrained ears, sounds serviceable enough, although in one scene she says ‘school’ and ‘iskool’ both. But that, among several other problems with the show, is that the director’s fault; another take was perhaps so as .
Among a cast filled with veteran character actors, however, it’s the always reliable Amit Sial who appears to be most comfortable . He plays Bheema’s political rival, who is certainly not modelled on Nitish Kumar. And if there’s a reason why casting director Mukesh Chhabra thought someone who seems like they’re from Tamil Nadu should play the Bihar top cop, I didn’t catch on . for a few time, i assumed that it had been a posting situation, but no, DGP Siddhant Gautam is meant to be a three-decade veteran within the Bihar police.
Speaking of Chhabra, it’s now time to debate the Subhash Kapoor-shaped elephant within the room. Props to him for tackling such a volatile subject at a time when even the slightest whiff of controversy is enough to send fringe outfits into a full-blown feeding frenzy. But it’s interesting to notice that his response to allegations of sexual misconduct was to supply two back-to-back projects with ‘powerful’ women at their centre. Hmm. That’s the political drama I’m more curious about .
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