Review: Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen has all the trappings of '90s Bollywood pulp, but lacks cinematic breadth and feel

Tahir Raj Bhasin and Anchal Singh in 'Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen'.

In form, Sidharth Sengupta’s Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen assuredly returns to 1990s’ Bollywood pulp in certain ways—scenes are treated with earnest melodrama; even subterfuges are elaborately mapped and explained. The title is a hit Baazigar (1993) song. The title track is a reimagining of the same song, and much of the music, composed by Shivam Sengupta and Anuj Danait, has throwback lilts to the eclectic sounds of 1990s’ Hindi music, overhauled by modern jazz and hip-hop. The porn-producing best friend of Vikrant (Tahir Bhasin), the protagonist—a classic middle-India 20-something with an engineering degree and a humdrum job in sight—accuses him of “Shahrukhgiri”. The story itself has themes that resonate with Baazigar, a Shah Rukh hit that subverted the hero-villain pyramid: passionate romance, the ordinary man forced to confront the extraordinary, rising up to meet the extraordinary, and the sinuous and perilous road to revenge.

Driven largely by plot rather than the inner life of characters, broad themes or the macro landscape of politics and class divide, Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen is a romance with gangster genre tropes. Love is either unattainable or attained with coercion. The eight-episode series has the flavour and feel of a pulp thriller, but because it doesn’t quite transcend the good-versus-evil framework in the way the characters develop; predictability rather than thrill—moral or otherwise—defines its arc.

Vikrant is the son of an accountant (Brijendra Kalra) who works for a local politician named Akhiraj Awasthi (Saurabh Shukla). Vikrant’s family is in awe of the Awasthi supremacy based on muscle power, guns and money. Vikrant’s parents serially silence his desire to move away from the shadows of his father’s servility, which Vikrant is ashamed of. Vikrant has the appointment letter for a job far away from home where the series is set—a fictional town similar to Varanasi known as Onkara. He hopes to leave with Shikha (Shweta Sharma Tripathi), his college sweetheart from another caste. His dream remains a dream because he becomes an object of desire for Awasthi’s daughter Purva (Anchal Singh) whose invitation for a friendship Vikrant had rejected when both were in school together. How could both go to the same school? Because, of course, Awasthi did his  accountant a favour by getting his son admitted to the same upper-class school. When Purva meets Vikrant as an adult, she is determined to marry Vikrant. The series begins with a line from Othello: “For she had eyes and she chose me.” Vikrant has no choice but to marry her and in the process of being son-in-law to Awasthi, Vikrant loses all that he has held dear. Will a new man emerge in the process of restoring his original bearings? Will Vikrant embrace Dark to counter Dark?

Marzi Pagdiwala’s cinematography, the music and a racy pace keep the momentum going until the last three episodes dwindle into abject 90s’ schlock, hurtling towards the climax that puts Vikrant in a spot of unmitigated jeopardy—something his straight-jacketed brain couldn’t have fathomed. A Season 2 could finally be where Vikrant embraces and embodies the dark avenger reminiscent of Ajay Sharma, Shah Rukh Khan’s innocuously-named character in Baazigar.

Tripathi, as a woman on the run because she and her family are Vikrant’s allies, is a competent actor—but without any shades to the character, she is much less exciting as an actor compared to her run in the film Masaan or even Mirzapur in which she played the role of Golu Gupta. Shukla is in classic Bollywood straight-faced villain mode, and he pulls off the role effortlessly. In his Web series debut, protagonist role, Bhasin (recently seen in the role of Sunil Gavaskar in 83), has a brooding presence on screen. It is a role that ought to require transformative moments, encapsulating suffering, steeliness as well as adaptability and deception. But compared to the promise that Sengupta, also the writer of the series, sets up for Vikrant, he doesn’t transcend the helpless good boy mode. Bhasin has much promise as an actor. In the role of Purva, the most complex and challenging role in the series, Sharma is adept, but without the charm or surprise latent in a character whose very outline spells doom or trauma.

Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen has several compelling moments where performance, technicality and storytelling tropes come together for optimum effect. But with excessive focus on plotting, it is a more lukewarm genre-fuser or genre-bender than it sets out to be. The best web series have a cinematic breadth and feel. Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen runs like a competent television serial stretched to several hours of a series.