Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: Dimple Kapadia Is Bada** With Her Army Of Women In Black By Her Side, But…

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: Star Rating:

Cast: Dimple Kapadia, Radhika Madan, Isha Talwar, Angira Dhar, Deepak Dobriyal, Varun Mitra, Udit Arora, and ensemble.

Creator: Homi Adajania.

Director: Homi Adajania

Streaming On: disney+ Hotstar.

Language: Hindi (with subtitles).

Runtime: 8 Episodes, Around 60 Minutes Each.

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: What’s It About:

In the wilderness of a desert, a matriarch Rani Maa (Dimple), runs an illegal drug factory. With her daughter and daughter-in-laws, she produces and sells an exceptional quality drug called the Flamingo. In an ecosystem smoothly run by women, when men are invited, and their egos are hurt, hell breaks loose, and now Rani Maa has to save the day.

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: What Works:

There is a substantial unique quality in how filmmaker Homi Adajania approaches his female characters. He is never bothered about what side of the spectrum women in his universe are; what matters is what choices they make at that moment that decides their future regardless of their gender or what it brings with it. That technically gives his content an upper hand in the list of such products. Example, the ever-so-rogue Veronica in Cocktail, who went into an offensive zone to find her redemption, or Angie in Finding Fanny, who finally decided to make sure her grief is not defined by anyone else but her, but she wasn’t the idealised righteous person too.

With Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo, Homi Adajania, with his longtime collaborator Kersi Khambatta (Being Cyrus, Finding Fanny, and more), write a story of a world that feels is set far away from the patriarchal human settlement. He embodies his world in a woman and names her the Rani of a fortress that stands tall right in the centre of nowhere. She runs a drug syndicate and has involved all the women from her family and the ones she rescued from hell in the same. Some make the drugs, one sells, one formulated, and others are bandits who can kill a man from far away without even aiming. It is a fun, interesting setup because how often have we seen a woman being a bada** in the mainstream?

There is so much in the writing of Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo that it keep unraveling layer after layer with each episode and only immerses its viewer deeper into the alleys of the fort it is set in. What meets the eye with the trailer and the first episode is just a tip, and there is much more to explore. While there is rage that fuels these women in black, Homi unexpectedly navigates through that fuel. When he takes you to the end of the process of explaining this world and setting up the base, he pushes you off the cliff to understand what created this universe in the first place. Women who are oppressed, exploited, and silenced came together not to revolt and kill the men but to kill their very egos by showing them, they can run the show.

Full marks for the idea that men are never allowed to take the driver’s seat in this world. What adds much more to this idea are the visuals that always shoot the women as the heroes of this world and never otherwise. They are brutal when their loved ones are at risk. They are bonded by trauma and not blood, there is much to explore, from their bodily desires, to their oppressed aspirations. The frames are well thought off and beautiful.

The set design is worth every minute, and it makes the fort a character. The styling works amazingly inside the fort and is well-edged. One has to appreciate the fact how Homi and the team packed Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo as a borderline comedy show with a hint of parody of the family soap operas and ended up exploring something much deeper.

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: Star Performance:

Dimple Kapadia, as Rani Maa, aka Savitri, is a firebrand. There is no way she can ever go wrong in the Homi Adajania world because she knows what the filmmaker expects from her and delivers even more. For an actor who has been appearing in projects like Tenet, Tu Joothi Main Makkaar, this character seems impossible, but Kapadia knows no such word.

There is so much ease in how she plays Savitri with. Yes, the dialect does sound forced in parts, but the acting compensates.

Isha Talwar takes the second position with her balanced act as she plays a closeted married woman. The closeted part of her life doesn’t her the share of the main pie, but the actor does play the part with all the conviction and nuances. Radhika Madan is natural, and this role comes to her quite organically. As Shanta, she is quite fierce. However, her dilemma isn’t explored completely. Angira Dhar gets the most twisted part, and she plays it pretty well too. But, the way she unravels herself is too daily soap method.

Deepak Dobriyal becomes a stereotypical monk villain. Varun Mitra does what he is expected to. Ashish Verma as Harish is the standout in men here. He serves as the comic node, also the antagonist of sorts, and the idea of male chavunism as a person. The actor is brilliant at performing this tricky part.

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: What Doesn’t Work:

Deservingly so, Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo takes its sweet time to develop the tale and marinate us in this world and its culture quite nicely. But when it gets into the main act, it decides to wear its running shoes. Even with a lot of time spent, it still feels paced up and incomplete at many levels. Like when the matriarch announces she is hunting for an heir, it all feels like just a plot device to create a conflict and not an organic twist. This kind of decides the future of the show, where everything follows a daily soap blueprint, of which it was trying to be a spoof in the first place.

Like there is a police officer trying his level best to bust this syndicate, he is pushed so much to the extreme that one of his final frames has him killing goats ruthlessly. But we never saw him go this made before in the show? There was not even a hint of the entire story affecting his mental state so brutally.

Add to all this the finale and the climax that are the most harmful aspects about this fun show. The twists are uncalculated so predictable that when they appear, you have already smelled them from a mile away. Also, why does it feel like the last few pages of an exam sheet?

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: Last Words:

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo is a show that is brilliant in setting up a story but goes haywire in understanding what to do with it.

Must Read: Garmi Review: Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Coming Of Age Drama Is A Fresh Take On An Already Explored Landscape

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