Angered and hurt by the accidental reveal of his wife’s secret life, a husband decides to go down the path of revenge, creating a journey of self-discovery. If she can hire a gigolo, well then, he can be one.
Amazon Prime Video’s Rangeen, in which Vineet Kumar Singh plays the furious cuckold and Rajshri Deshpande the wife-who-strays, may remind you of last year’s Tribhuvan Das CA. But Rangeen creators and writers Amardeep Galsin and Amir Rizvi want to give us more: it’s not just the husband who is given a chance to learn life lessons; the same courtesies are extended to the wife.
What’s nice and that’s truly the most special part of this nine-part series, is that Deshpande’s character, Naina, refuses to apologise for her actions. She’s done this not once, as she declares, but several times and she is not sorry. A woman’s loneliness, in bed and out of it, is reason enough for her to seek succour outside of her marriage, and no one needs to ‘judge her for it, ‘Kyunki woh kaam samaaj pehle se hi kar raha hai’, declares Sitara, the madam (Sheeba Chadha) who conducts her business discretely, giving off a sympathetic parlour-aunty vibe. That’s on-the-nose dialoguing but here you make space for it, given Adarsh’s reactions – chasing off after young Sunny (Taaruk Raina) who is caught canoodling with his wife, to give him the beating of his life.
I’m all for the web space getting courageous in matters of sexual freedoms for men and women, given that the movies are harking back in time. But watching the struggle of the self-righteous Adarsh, who makes a precarious living as an honest small-time journalist, trying to switch up his seduction game becomes really trying because Rangeen does major straying of its own. Sub-stories featuring jailed petty criminals, fierce-eyed women who like hunting wild boar and hoods-trying-to-be-menacing crowd the canvas. Why? Because the games men and women play isn’t enough to fill nine episodes? It’s like something is about to go on the boil and then being allowed to fizzle out. It turns the central pair uninteresting, as well as the series, which ultimately becomes a case of a few lunges, not enough parries.
Good actors and tepid writing plus tonal switches is not a good match. Singh does try hard but to hear a character say ‘Bond lag rahe ho?’ Um, no. Rajshri Deshpande and Sheeba Chadha, both actors capable of surprising you, do nothing of the sort, which is nothing short of criminal. Taaruk Raina’s likeable guy who enjoys what he does and yet wants to run away from his life, is about the only one with any verve: no 3sum, he texts, but gets into it anyway, with the help of some magic mushrooms, helpfully labelled ‘kukurmutta’ in Hindi, just in case we didn’t get it. A client whose thing is humiliation, brings it forward from her own marital relationship, and it takes Sitara to create an explainer for the clueless Adarsh for him to understand the whys and wherefores.
Rangeen movie trailer:
Rangeen attempts to up the sexual intimacy stakes and the feminist bar, while questioning masculine norms. But it’s neither colourful nor edgy, both of which it is trying for. I’m still waiting for the definitive desi show which will engage with full-blown lust without hedging its bets with caution and surrounding it with superfluous bits and pieces.
Rangeen movie cast: Vineet Kumar Singh, Rajshri Deshpande, Taaruk Raina, Sheeba Chadha, Meghna Malik
Rangeen movie director: Komal Naithani, Pranjal Dua
Rangeen movie rating: 2 stars
