Saas Bahu aur Flamingo has great ideas but poor creative instincts

Radhika Madaan plays Shanta - Rani Ba's daughter and inventor of flamingo, a cocaine-based drug - in 'Saas, Bahu aur Flamingo', streaming on Disney + Hotstar' since May 5, 2023.

In a scene from Disney+Hotstar’s Saas Bahu aur Flamingo, two brothers who have just returned from US, discover that their mother has been building a multi-crore drug empire all this time. “Yaar mummy ke liye respect aagyi dil mein,” one of them tells the other. It’s a scene that underlines the confirmation bias men hold against feminine power. Not until it feels like a threat, does it also feel worth considering. It’s one of the many scenes that light up this part fun, part self-serious exploration of a world where women rub shoulders with men, even force them to cower with sheer exuberant grit. There’s plenty of cockiness on show, the rare sight of male leads happily submitting to being tokenized, ripped apart for ridicule and a decent balance between the darkness and the humour for the most part. For all its quirky, audacious ideas, though, the show’s creative instincts flail and at times, sabotage their own possibilities.

Set in the fictional Rann Pradesh, the show tells the outrageous tale of Savitri (Dimple Kapadia), a complicated, hardened matriarch of a family that runs a drug cartel out of a fictional border village. Savitri’s daughters-in-law are accomplices and so are the many women of the village. There is also her daughter, Shanta, played by the excellent Radhika Madaan. Rani Ba, as she is known, also has two sons who stay overseas, unaware of the criminal empire being run behind their backs. The women, including those of the village employed by Savitri, work together while the men supplicate them by passing orders down the food chain. The secret drug they have concocted - Shanta's recipe - is called flamingo. Hence the name.

Also read: ‘Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo’ director Homi Adajania: ‘Those who want old school saas-bahu kitchen politics, won’t find that here’

A premise as quirky and off-beat requires terrific actors to carry it past the point of believability. Kapadia is stunning as the complicated woman who can switch between mother and unrepentant murderer in the blink of an eye. Kapadia’s younger subjects are just as feisty, casually strutting their will with buoyancy and self-awareness. Angira Dhar and Isha Talwar play the ‘bahus’, Kajal and Bijlee - women, we gradually learn, Savitri has rescued from tough situations.

Isha Talwar and Angira Dhar play the ‘bahus’, Bijlee and Kajal.

Rani Ba’s sons, on the other hand, play the perfect foil for the tightly-knit, ludicrously brave business these women run all of their own will. Played by Ashish Verma and Varun Mitra, the two are comic, metaphorically replacing the cosmetic roles that cinema usually only imagines for women. Here the two brothers hopelessly attempt to impose themselves on things they do not understand. Verma’s is a scene-stealing presence, his immaturity coupled with the alacrity to say what’s right without actually thinking about how it could also be interpreted as wrong. It’s this stubbornness that makes every punchline all the more incisive.

There is plenty happening in the show, from a dumb-faced cop poking around the family business, to a murderous, bald monk (Deepak Dobriyal) who wants to maim everyone in sight. There is, in fact, frankly too much happening here to keep track or even care after a point. After a point you can’t help but wonder if the wonky premise would have been better served with the comic book treatment of a smaller film. Something that was knuckleheaded and purer in its most immediate provocations. Instead, the show wants to layer an unconventional premise with the familiar and ultimately tiring depth of a narrative that travels both forward and back in time. Madaan, for example, is romantically involved with a member of the clan while Talwar’s character has tender secrets locked away in her closet. There are others as well and frankly too many to list or even bother about.

Saas Bahu aur Flamingo soars when it occupies itself with the reversal of gender roles. The men dither, while the woman stomp. They curl up in fear, while the women gladly take the wheel. It’s in these moments, when smug claimants realize they are essentially second-rate citizens in a world carved by women, that you really see the show shine. When the quotidian order flips, the awkwardness of this barely believable world seamlessly turns into comedy. It’s when the show wants to imitate the already seen, and trained tropes of true crime, that it begins to both drag and confuse its own trajectory.

There is a lot to love about the show that comes packed in a peculiar little yarn, at times baffling, at times overindulgent. Dobriyal, for example, is exceptional yet vaguely adrift of the main narrative. So are the cops investigating from a distance. Then there are the tonal, at times ungainly, shifts that switch between wickedness and dreary wisdom. The backdrop to all this is tragedy but in the moment, the series is a mix of everything, and ultimately nothing in particular. It forces you to wonder what a front-footed pulpy approach to the same narrative might have felt like. Because the more this show ponders its soul, the more laborious, and stretched it seems. But for all of its moody, iterative failings, twists and unnecessary segues, it is never not watchable.

Saas Bahu aur Flamingo is streaming on Disney + Hotstar