Grime, guts and glory: Women and the OTT

'Mai' derives its hearty zest through solid performances, most unforgettably the one at the centre, Sakshi’s Tanwar’s Sheel. (Image: Netflix)

The plot of Netflix’s new crime drama produced by Clean Slate Filmz, Mai, borders on the absurd. Its protagonist Sheel (Sakshi Tanwar) is obsessed with finding the person responsible for the murder of her mute daughter Supriya (Wamiqa Gabbi). To get to that goal, she gets embroiled in a medical scam masterminded by a family with which she is a house nurse.

Sheel is steely. She eliminates any roadblock in her way to avenge the hit-and-run death of her daughter through actions, detours and contrivances that become more and more incredulous as the six-episode series progresses.

Produced by Clean Slate Filmz, the limited series of six episodes has excellent production standards. But that’s not the only thing that sets it apart. Mai has a crackling tension which, despite the story’s implausible twists and turns, doesn’t let up until the grossly anti-climactic climax of Sheel’s journey that almost ends in avenging a past and rewriting a future.

The other more compelling reason Mai is so engrossing as a series is - not how the story’s architecture dilates - but the strong performances. The writing by Atul Mongia (who is also the creator and co-director along with Anshai Lal) with Amita Vyas and Tamal Sen derives its hearty zest through solid performances, most unforgettably the one at the centre, Sakshi’s Tanwar’s Sheel.

Sheel is a woman undone by the family she married into, which includes her forbearing but irresolute husband Yash—a man defined more by familial expectations than his own dreams. She has sound knowledge of medicine and medical procedures—her past dream to be a doctor is mentioned more than twice. Sheel is righteous and wants to do “right”. As a mother, she has ready corrective slaps for her children, but as we learn almost as soon as the series takes off, she can also take on mortal peril for the sake of her children. Her daughter knows her mother’s strictness about do’s and don’ts, and does not confide in her. The mild-mannered father is a better option to share secrets with. When Supriya dies, Sheel’s grief doesn’t bubble over—instead, it seeps into the inner recesses of a larger repository of grief that she has been storing all her life. Messy realities of her personal life start emerging as her mission sails without bumps. She has a fundamental inquisitiveness that speaks to an active mind, and as the avenging spectre “doctorani” incredulously reaching all the rights spots in sleepy Lucknow the story is set in, she holds our gaze.

Tanwar has been a television actress for decades. Here, her performance creates art out of a quiet watchfulness and alacrity—translated on screen by close-ups—that’s anything but placid. The show is too occupied with Sheel’s misery, and in that sense, Tanwar has the job of pushing against the story’s emotional grist. The achievement of Tanwar’s performance is that for as much as Sheel may seem wronged or undone by grief or family baggage, we come to believe by the end of Season 1 that she has it in her, perhaps more than ever before in her life, to be more radically brave and much more a vehicle of her own destiny than when we first meet her.

In that sense, Mongia’s series is a wonderful addition to a growing number of stories in India in which a woman’s character can be understood beyond limiting rubrics like feminism—characters whose actions and inner impulses have no socio-historical logic or explanation, women who aren’t going against any grain or following a grain of female-normative behaviour as seen in Indian films but are just a thread in the complex history of human behaviour. Mongia gives us four well-defined women in his story, and pivots his series around them: Sheel; Sheel’s daughter Supriya, a storyteller and stand-up comedian who uses sign language; Neelam (Raima Sen), a morally corrupt woman who embodies brutal male power in order to survive; and Kalpana, Sheel’s only ally and a woman with her own criminal past, who is still capable of being a sympathiser to another woman.

Mongia, 43, has been a casting director in Bollywood for about two decades now (Love, Sex Aur Dhoka, Lootera, Titli, Queen and several others), and he is known best for his acting workshops. He is known to be an excellent trainer for actors using unconventional methods and references. Tanwar, known for her Everywoman Indianness in saas-bahu soaps, takes on this role with a relish. It must have been serendipitous with someone like Mongia who is invested in actors. So in the way Sheel comes alive, Mongia and Tanwar have together charted new territory for writing and shooting with women protagonists.

Tripti Dimri in Qala, the story of a woman in heartbreaking pursuit of maternal love. (Netflix)

Mai’s producer Clean Slate Filmz was started by Anushka Sharma. Now her co-founder and brother Karnesh Ssharma helms it. It has been a fulcrum of women-led stories since it began with Navdeep Singh’s NH 7 with Sharma in the lead role in 2015. Sharma played the lead in another home production Pari (2018). Clean Slate has also produced one of Netflix’s most memorable films of 2020, Anvitaa Dutt’s Bulbbul. Written by Dutt, a lyricist in the industry for many years, and filmed with a signature stamp of rich symbolism and visual pluck, Dutt examines the folklore surrounding the chudail—just as the heels of the female demon are turned outwards, Dutt’s directorial debut inverts everything we believe about witches. With Bulbbul’s lead actor Tripti Dimri, Dutt is at work on Qala, also for Netflix and also a Clean Slate production, which has been described as a story of a woman in heartbreaking pursuit of maternal love.

It is canny timing that just a few days before Mai dropped on Netflix, Clean Slate Filmz announced CleanSlate the OTT, “the world’s only female-focused original content streaming platform”. Ssharma’s company signed a partnership with Yorkshire County Cricket Club (YCCC) for the celebratory official launch of the OTT platform in Mumbai recently. Ssharma says that the partnership is like the perfect marriage between two organisations with bold ambitions to become tentpoles for diversity and acceptance. “We want to be able to inspire women in sport, just as we do in film and entertainment,” Ssharma adds. Clean Slate also announced that they will be the principal partner for the women’s cricket team Northers Diamonds.

Vidya Balan as journalist Maya Menon in 'Jalsa'. (Image: Amazon Prime Video)

Recent series and films to have come out of India, which have distinctly women-forward characters, storylines or crews are few but memorable. Jalsa (Amazon Prime Video), with Vidya Balan and Shefalee Shah, is about intersecting motherhood. Human (Disney + Hotstar), again with Shefalee Shah in a lead role, is about a girl wounded in her childhood beyond repair, who channels monstrous instincts in her to get ahead of and avenge her oppressors. In the last two years, we have seen Sherni, the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, Bulbbul, and Geeli Pucchi, a story in the Netflix anthology Ajeeb Daastaans which places its absolutely luminous, quietly explosive lead character, the Dalit-queer Bharti (Konkona Sensharma) in India’s historical faultlines where power, trust, and class and class identities converge. The other names that come to mind are Pagglait (Netflix), Mimi (Netflix, Jio Cinemas), Madam Chief Minister (theatres), Rashmi Rocket (Zee 5), Saina (theatres, Amazon Prime), Thalaivii (Amazon Prime), Tribhanga (Netflix), and of course Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi which did fairly well at the box office, clocking more than Rs100 crore within 13 days of its release, and continuing to find audiences the world over. The film is scheduled to drop on Netflix at the end of April.

So for Karnesh Ssharma and his newly formed CleanSlate OTT, this is a historic opportunity. He says, “The programming currently within the Indian film industry is 70-80 percent male dominated, but we want to cater to a 360-degree consumer base, producing content that everyone would value regardless of their gender. Our content library will place female professionals at the centre.” It will include films, long format series, docu-series and unscripted reality shows. He says their market segmentation research shows up to 50 percent of viewership in India comes from women, yet most of the content is male focused.

Alia Bhatt in 'Gangubai Kathiawadi', based on "The Matriarch of Kamathipura".

It is undoubtedly an ideal, celebratory mandate: To provide an environment for female professionals including actors, directors, producers, writers, technicians and support staff who contribute to the process of storytelling and the business, to thrive and be free of all barriers and restrictions. “We want to provide a much more equal path for career progression and longevity for women in the industry.”

The CleanSlate content roster will comprise international and regional projects including originally curated and produced works by Clean Slate Filmz and pre-selected projects that meet the Clean Slate messaging framework by other producers from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The library will showcase the work of directors, scriptwriters, actors, and producers associated with Clean Slate Filmz, as well as emerging talent. To be driven by a SVOD annual subscription model, it will be launched only in India initially.

Anvitaa Dutt, co-founder of the OTT, having worked as a writer in the film industry for around two decades, seasoned in the struggles and biases inherent in it, says, “We are working in an era where the success of productions written or directed by women are celebrated as anomalies. In a way this is the root of the problem. We are striving for an era where we don’t define or laud a  production as ‘created by a woman’ or have female-only categories at major award ceremonies. We’re not there yet, far from it, in fact. Therefore, we need a platform to be able to leverage the talents of female professionals and normalise their brilliance, so that one day in the future we no longer need to have this conversation.”