Political Maze:
Two middle-aged politicians are in bed. “Do you want to be Prime Minister?” he asks her. “No, I want power without scrutiny,” she replies. Then she asks him if he wants to be PM, and he says no with a smile, and she calls him a liar. As if the PM’s position is a passing-the-parcel game that anyone can play! This bizarre scene takes place in the third season of Nagesh Kukunoor’s politics for dummies series City Of Dreams, which said pretty much what it wanted to say in Season 1—that politicians will stop at nothing, including fratricide, to grab power.
In Season One, Poornima Gaikwad (Priya Bapat) had wrested the chair of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra by killing her brother, while her father, Ameya Rao (Atul Kulkarni) recovered from an assassination attempt. Season 2 had introduced a whole smorgasbord of unsavoury characters, and ended with the death of Poornima’s young son in a bomb blast. A few of these characters return in the new season, but are reduced to padding as useless as packing beans, simply to extend the show to nine episodes.
Poornima is so distraught at her son’s death, that she vanishes, leaving her father to defend the fort from the in-house termite Jagdish Gurav (Sachin Pilgaonkar), and woman scorned from Delhi, Vibha (Divya Seth Shah), who want to see Ameya Rao weep.
In one of the many unintentionally comic scenes in the show, Poonima’s loyal cop Wasim Khan (Eijaz Khan), back in uniform after a stint with politics, traces her to a BDSM joint in Bangkok, getting flogged! In an odd way of showing grief, she also downs shots and does a spot of dirty dancing in a nightclub—the video of which surfaces online, mirroring the real-life crisis faced by Finnish PM, Sanna Marin. After following her around like a pug, Wasim succeeds in bringing her back, and she reconciles with her father, much to the dismay of Gurav who was coveting the CM’s post.
The political tug-of-war is the most interesting part of the series, and manages to capture the horse-trading of MLAs, hiding them in a resort and haggling for benefits, that has been seen in real life. However, if a director wants to bottle the essence of streaming classic Succession, they have to try harder. Kukunoor and his co-writer, Rohit Banawlikar keep diffusing the tension by veering into needless sub-plots, like the drugs task force headed by Wasin, and the maudlin romance between a drug mule (Tejas Raut) and innocent north Eastern receptionist (Manila Pradhan).
Kukunoor also has the tendency towards making some of his characters over-the-top weird—like the agoraphobic media baron (Rannvijay Singha) who confines himself to a ‘smart’ home, an actor (Ali Asghar), who is always dressed in shorts and satin dressing down, rubbing cocaine into his mouth with a toothbrush; and hammy TV anchor Kasturinath (Girish Sharma), inspired by Sansani’s Shrivardhan Trivedi. The laconic Anna (Sushant Singh), whose vocabulary is limited to “milk” and few other words, returns from the previous season, but is given very little to do.
Politics, like crime, is rife with treachery, is what the series purports to portray, and when it keeps to this track, it even rises above the mundane drug busts and murders. Poornima, with crisp white saris and unwavering glare, turns out to be sharp and unsentimental—except for memories of her dead son—and stymies all plots against her. The best scenes of the show are the civilized but cutting verbal jousts between the two ambitious women, Vibha and Poornima, (Vibha easily winning the gorgeous sari contest). Still, Poornima for all her ruthlessness, is naïve enough to claim that she wants to be in politics to serve the people of the state. She goes by Wasim’s dictum, “Achchai ka farz banta hai ki burai to khatam kare.” Ironic, since she stops at nothing to get rid of obstacles, but does not see herself as evil.
Kukunoor has cast mostly Maharashtrian actors in key roles, and they bring their talent and authenticity to the table; Atul Kulkarni and Priya Bapat never hit a false note, Sachin Pilgaonkar brings out the contradictions of his character—hiding deviousness under the ever-smiling visage. Divya Seth Shah is so delightful as Vibha, that if there is a Season 4, it will be worth a watch for her.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)