Ray is a 4-part anthology web series on Netflix, based on a corresponding number of the eponymous Satyajit Ray’s short stories, each episode (Forget Me Not, Bahupriya, Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa, Spotlight are their titles) being 50-65 minutes long, and deals with themes like infidelity, chauvinism, pride, anonymity, kleptomania, religion and fame.

Ray Cast: Ali Fazal, Shweta Basu Prasad, Kay Kay Menon, Manoj Bajpayee, Gajraj Rao, Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Radhika Madan, Manoj Pahwa, Bidita Bag
Ray Directors: Srijit Mukherji, Abhishek Chaubey, Vasan Bala
Where to Watch: Netflix Also Read – ‘It is heartbreaking,’ says Bhumi Pednekar as Sonchiriya gets snubbed by major film awards

Anthologies, be it OTT films or web series, have become the new vogue over the past few years with several Bollywood filmmakers and actors dipping their hand in the sea. However, besides Ajeeb Dastans, most have included hit or miss stories, with everyone from Lust Stories and Ghost Stories to Zindagi In Short and Unpaused being extremely inconsistent in their ability to string together a bunch of riveting, unconnected stories, none coming within a whisker of the Tamil anthology show, Paava Kadhaigal, incidentally also on Netflix. So, where does the streaming giant’s latest anthology series, Ray, fall? Well, forget Paava Kadhaigal or Ajeeb Dastans, it’s not even as good as a Lust Stories, and would makes Satyajit Ray, whose short stories have inspired the web series, very disappointed. Also Read – Abhishek Chaubey confirms directing the Jigarthanda remake, says cast is not finalised [Exclusive]
What’s it about

Ray is a 4-part anthology web series on Netflix, based on a corresponding number of the eponymous Satyajit Ray’s short stories, each episode (Forget Me Not, Bahupriya, Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa, Spotlight are their titles) being 50-65 minutes long, and deals with themes like infidelity, chauvinism, pride, anonymity, kleptomania, religion and fame. Also Read – After winning Kerala State Award for Carbon, Vishal Bhardwaj to compose songs in more languages

What’s hot

The only two good things about Ray are the performances and cinematography, but they’re so good that they just about save the show from being a total letdown. Everyone from the lead actors such as Ali Fazal, Kay Kay Menon, Manoj Bajpayee, Harshvardhan Kapoor to the main supporting cast like Shweta Basu Prasad, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Radhika Madan to even the players with smaller roles like Manoj Pahwa, Bidita Bag and other put in stellar acts, sinking deep into their reserves to portray the complex themes and emotions that are at the heart of Satyajit Ray’s stories, long or short. And each episode has been hauntingly, bewitchingly shot by the likes of Swapnil Sonawane, Arkodeb Mukherjee, Eeshit Narain, which helped me somehow make an effort (a very tough one) to sit through the whole web series to the very end.
What’s not

Either the creative team chose the wrong short stories of Satyajit Ray to adapt to screen (not every good piece of literature makes a good movie or show) or they just didn’t do it well enough for today’s audience. All three Director, Srijit Mukherji, Abhishek Chaubey, Vasan Bala, and the writer, Niren Bhatt and Sayantan Mukherjee, display a complete lack of energy midway through each of their individual stories. It gets exceedingly annoying to sit through almost an hour-long episode, where the narrative is built well till about halfway through, only for everything to fizzle out thereafter.

It also seems like they just couldn’t get a proper grip of the complexity of the tales, doing no favours to the actors who did. And in this day and age with easy access to dark, intriguing Korean and other similar foreign content, our makers need to be right on the money to keep their audience switched on, especially on OTT platforms with the option to change but a click away. Ray also doesn’t benefit from some seriously sloppy editing and an unenthusiastic background score, barring the one for Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa.

Directed by Amit Masurkar, Vidya Balan plays a forest officer trying to resolve man-animal conflicts in Sherni. The film started streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, June 18.

Movie Name: Sherni
Cast: Vidya Balan
Director: Amit Masurkar

Sherni opens to a panoramic view of the forest. You know you have landed in the middle of dense, raw danger. So does Vidya Balan, who plays Divisional Forest Officer Vidya Vincent, in the film. Vidya is here to resolve human-animal conflicts – stuff we read about in the newspapers every day. But her battles go beyond just that. She has to find her own footing as a woman in a man’s world.

Just like the central force of the film – tigers – Vidya also lies low, not from fear, but for aim. She subtly finds her way through the jungle, just as Sherni attempts to journey Hindi cinema to a terrain that has been probed, but not explored.

In Amit Masurkar’s Sherni, we are introduced to India’s wild spaces, which face seemingly unstoppable threats from poaching, deforestation and overgrazing. That’s one side of the story. On the other, there are communities that rely on forest returns for their livelihoods. Meanwhile, cattle and men venturing into the jungle are turning up dead. Yes, a wild cat is on the loose. Caught in the middle of this are forestry officials and our protagonist Vidya Vincent.

Sherni is reminiscent of Avni or T1’s case. The tigress was accused of killing 13 people. After months-long hunt, she was shot dead in 2018 in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, by a civilian hunter-led search accompanied by some forest department officials. Many activists described it as ‘cold-blooded murder’ and the case even reached the Supreme Court of India. The case is still going on with officials trying to find whether Avni was a man-eater or not.

Coming back to Sherni, Vidya soon realises that humans and tigers are both endangered. This fact hits her when lives are lost in the jungle and a politician grabs the opportunity to make big promises about showing the tiger its rightful place – sending it to a zoo or a circus, that is. Even the forest department remains complacent and corrupt. Things are not that different in reel or real lives.

Kartik Subbaraj’s Jagame Thandiram, starring Dhanush sets itself a lofty goal, but begins to limp in the first few minutes due to its weak script.

Jagame Thandiram

Director: Karthik Subbaraj

Cast: Dhanush, Aishwarya Lekshmi, James Cosmo

Tamil cinema still, in this day and age, believes that a film must pack into its runtime every aspect of life and living or just about. Director Karthik Subbaraj’s almost three-hour long gangster adventure mostly set in London, Jagame Thandhiram, just does this, giving us a taste of dances, fights with bullets narrowly missing one’s ears and the radical side of British politics. Yes, you heard me right, with some of that country’s leaders trying to stop immigration of especially brown and Black people – with special reference to Sri Lankan Tamils — and deport them.
Immigration may be a pressing issue in countries across continents, but that a young man from Madurai – who runs a “parotta” eatery by the day turning into a sickle-weaving thug after sunset — should pop into London to “sort” things out appears farfetched, even with our thinking hats off. And this young man is none other than Suruli, played by Dhanush (who is increasingly copying father-in-law Rajinikanth’s mannerisms), a small-time gangster from Madurai.

With his marriage being called off at the eleventh hour, Suruli becomes an even bigger desperado willing to place his neck on the block, and flies to London.. While Suruli is turning the city into a bloody mess, I began to wonder what the heck Scotland Yard was doing! Come on, England is not the badlands somewhere in Africa or closer home. But with blazing guns and whizzing bullets, Suruli vanquishes the foes, taking on dozens of men singlehandedly to emerge supreme. This is imagination gone berserk.

Penned by Subbaraj, the movie is just a one line plot: Suruli is hired by racist British mobster, Peter (James Cosmos), in faraway Madurai to kill his rival, Sivadoss (Joju George), a Sri Lankan Tamil. Suruli’s girlfriend, Attila (Aishwarya Lekshmi), is at best a flower-vase on the mantlepiece, but she does turn him into a Sri Lankan Tamil sympathiser, and it takes just one weepy story from her to convert our man.

The film sets itself a lofty goal, but begins to limp in the first few minutes. Scripted shabbily and edited with little care, it fails to invest in this theme. Instead, it goes all out to make a hero out of Dhanush, who has been coming up with the same, jaded performance for a long time. He probably has potential, but would need a good and imaginative director to get him out of his comfort zone. And, the kind of bloody violence that Subbaraj dishes out can be difficult to stomach, and his tendency to be another Quentin Tarantino is a pointless exercise.

Shaadisthan, starring Kirti Kulhari, is refreshing storytelling powerfully backed by sensitive and memorable performances from the lead cast.

Shaadisthan

Cast: Kirti Kulhari, Nivedita Bhattacharya, Rajan Modi

Director: Raj Singh Chaudhary

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a non-preachy, uncliched feminist story. Directed and co-written by Raj Singh Chaudhary, Shaadisthan is a moving drama about women breathing under patriarchy.

The film follows a conservative couple Sanjay (Rajan Modi) and Kamla Sharma (Nivedita Bhattacharya) from a small town of Rajasthan and their teenage daughter Arshi (Medha Shankar) who are forced to travel with four young, rebel musicians Freddie (Apurva Dogra), Jigme (Shenpenn Khymsar), Imaad (Ajay Jayanthi), and Sasha (Kirti Kulhari) to Ajmer for a family wedding.

As their contrasting ideologies collide inside a camper van, they reluctantly begin to share parts of their ordinarily segregated lives. In Sasha’s world, women can do whatever the hell they want to do. And for Sasha, that means a songwriter, a musician and a free spirit. On the other hand, Arshi is not even allowed to speak and verging on the breakdown, thanks to her father who is planning to marry her off as soon as she turns 18.

Chaudhary’s Shaadisthan is also about the roles of stay-at-home mothers from small towns of India. Kamla has been ignored, her spirit broken. It’s a tribute to the realness of the film and Nivedita Bhattacharya’s earnest performance that you end up wondering: What kind of life did Kamla dream of, this generous woman who ended up with a regressive partner and no room to breathe? Nivedita beautifully depicts the fears, insecurities, and pain that women deprived of social and economic independence go through. She slips into the skin of Kamla’s character so well that you feel for her throughout the movie.

Kirti Kulhari’s filmography is full of female-led stories. Take Falak Ali in Pink, Inspector Dalbir Kaur Bagga in The Girl on the Train, Advocate Anjana Menon in Four More Shots Please and her most recent award-worthy performance in Criminal Justice. But when she strips off the makeup and is embraced into the hippie group of young men to embody Sasha, the actress really roars as a woman. A scene where she schools Sanjay for calling their music “shor (noise)” is easily one of the best moments in the film.

However, Sasha’s feminism often comes across as privileged. She is educated, financially independent who can afford to leave her family and travel anywhere and everywhere, but she doesn’t realise that it’s not easy for Kamla to fight the entrenched societal sexism and patriarchy the way she does. Kamla is a non-working middle-class woman who is constantly facing an existential threat wherein freedom could mean loss of security and protection that patriarchy offers. Sasha reeks of privilege and naivety of the real world outside her insulated bubble when she tells Kamla, “Women like us fight so that women like you don’t have to fight in their world.”

Medha channels a teenager’s vulnerabilities and simmering frustrations with utmost honesty and sincerity that acts as a catalyst for the family to address issues they’d rather leave unspoken. Besides, the men of Shaadisthan- Apurva, Shenpenn, and Ajay- deserve a special mention for delivering memorable performances. Their camaraderie with Kirti seems extremely natural and real. Rajan Modi brilliantly plays the strict patriarchal father who thankfully has a change of heart at the end.

Shaadisthan is refreshing storytelling powerfully backed by sensitive and memorable performances from the talented cast. PS: Its women look exhausted by the end, but also freed, open, honest- just as they should be.

Shaadisthan is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.