Rangeen, the new nifty 9-part series from Amazon, is not a flawless presentation. Far from it. Rather, it revels in its imperfections: a failed marriage, the fractured ethics of a high-falutin journalist, a wife caught in the act with a gigolo, a wasted butcher’s son, a mysterious woman with a penchant for crocodiles and hired sex…
The characters as they emerge, sink their teeth into the vividly written script (Amardeep Galsin, Amir Rizvi) which allows the characters to breathe even as they suffocate themselves in their own destiny; none more so than the protagonist Adarsh Johri who is to this series what Kieran Culkin was in A Real Pain: a man so selfdestructive he doesn’t even know he is destroying his world.
The series, directed confidently if a tad unevenly by Pranjal Dua and Kopal Naithani, opens with Adarsh catching his wife Naina (Rajshree Deshpande, underused) in the act with a young gigolo Sunny(a charming Taaruk Raina) who works in his abusive father’s butcher’s shop during the day and moonlights as pleasure-providing meat for the ladies.
There is a delightful fight between Adarsh and Sunny at the outset where Adarsh uses a helmet and Sunny a mutton leg as their weapon. Such kookiness creeps mischievously into the otherwise rather tragic tale of a man who questions his masculinity after his wife cheats on him.
For a series on sexual transgressions, Rangeen has very little sex. Or even sex talk. Unlike Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper in which Manav Kaul played a gigolo with the appropriate physical qualifications, Rangeen is surprisingly coy about the human anatomy and its career-qualifying function in the sex worker’s line of duty.
There is only one major moment of spousal confrontation when Adarsh,wearing nothing except his shorts and a frown, asks his wife whether he is lacking in sexual drive.
“It’s not about sex,” she replies quietly.
Then what is it about? What impels a woman to cheat on her marriage, and that too with paid sex?
There is a damaging shyness on bodily functions in the series. That apart, its tangential flights are largely interesting, showing as they do how self-awareness creeps up on the protagonist Adarsh when he is not looking.
The series chooses to weaponize the characters’ minds rather than their bodies as a means to open up the debate on the validity of urban relationships.Everybody is constantly lying even to oneself. It is this constant veneer of self-deception that gives the series its delectable carriage.
There is a woman who goes visiting her criminal husband in jail, who buys takeaway food on the way, fills the tiffin carrier with bought food, and pretends it is ghar ka khana.
Deception trickles down to under the skin of the series. It is the inability of the characters to see the writing on the wall that makes the series so kindred in spirit and yet so irreverent in mood.
While the performances are uniformly likeable, Vineet Kumar, one of the finest actors of his generation, shines almost all through the series, except for one meltdown sequence which just doesn’t land.
