The Plot Congeals:
The novelty factor in the first season of Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein was that a man was lusted after by a woman, instead of the other way round. With the power of her gangster father behind her, she could even terrorise him into ditching his girlfriend and marrying her. He tries to find fool proof methods of killing her, and is shocked to discover that the hitman wants a large sum not to send her back. It was a freaky twist, and built the cliffhanger for Season 2 which also opens with a Shakespeare line: The course of true love never did run smooth.
This time it runs with all the convolutions of a video game. Vikrant (Tahir Raj Bhasin) is between a rock and a hard place. Crazy enough in hate for his wife Purva (Anchal Singh) to bomb a theatre to kill her, never mind how many others die in the bargain. As he is processing the news of his girlfriend Shikha (Shweta Tripathi) marrying another, the kidnapper, Jalan (Arunoday Singh) demands a huge ransom. The online lessons in weeping that he took in the last season go waste—he has to quickly uncrumple his weepy face and look shell-shocked at the kidnap news.
His evil father-in-law Akheraj (Saurabh Shukla) has the money and the manpower to hunt down the kidnapper, so Vikrant has to use all his wits to prevent the return of his Purva, without Akheraj finding out that he was behind her disappearance to begin with.
Director Siddharth Sengupta, with co-writer Umesh Padalkar, cooks up a complicated plot and then leaves it to simmer till it chars. With all his efforts, Vikrant is unable to prevent Shikha’s marriage, to a cop at that; a very unsuspecting Nikhil (Nikhil Pandey) who can’t tell the difference between blood and sindoor.
Then, the greedy Jalan gets an even bigger offer to deliver Purva to him, across the border in Nepal. Akheraj summons his London commando contact Guru (Gurmeet Choudhary), who arrives with his six-pack abs, two superefficient teammates, surveillance equipment and an arsenal of weapons. If Vikrant now looks permanently terrified, it is because he has the hounds of hell after him. At one point, he has to go through a chase rigmarole, carrying a bag with a human head in it.
The six-part show (on Netflix) piles on the complications and ups the odds for all the players. It would have been hilariously noir if it weren’t for some gross-out violence. Normal people would have turned green at the gills at the sight of a chopped up body, but everyone looks calm. They are such good actors – as characters in the show and also as actors performing those scenes.
Purva was seen as unhinged and vindictive in the last season; now she is in control, even in captivity – Jalan and his crew don’t know what hit them. In all the intermittently entertaining pulp fiction elements Sengupta puts together, he makes it so that Purva, meant to be a vamp, is an absolute hero—anyone who can run down a hill with hands tied and eyes covered deserves applause. Even Vikrant is so hapless that he becomes sympathetic. Later in the series, when problems quite literally land in his lap, in his generally whiny voiceover he says, “Observe two minutes of silence, for my luck.” (Dialogue by Varun Badola).
Tahir Raj Bhasin is an unlikely leading man, but he plays the part sportingly, without looking like he minds appearing to be a total loser. In this season, Shweta Tripathi hasn’t much to do, still, she carries off the tense sequences with ease. Anchal Singh is not portrayed as the traditional femme fatale, so she ably balances the wickedness with courage that is written for her character. There are some threads left loose for a possible Season 3, but it would require an even more febrile imagination to top this level of deliriousness.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
