Language: Hindi
In recent years, the Aditya Birla-owned studio Applause Entertainment has been involved in remaking several hit international TV shows. The Israeli shows Kvodo was remade into the Jimmy Shergill-led Your Honor, Pankaj Tripathi led the Indian remake of BBC’s Criminal Justice, and Hotstar’s Indian version of The Office was also well-received.
BBC and Applause have teamed up again, this time with an Indian remake of the BBC thriller Guilt, which became a sleeper hit a couple of years ago, and has since been well-received in America, where it was released via the PBS Masterpiece network in September. The show, directed by Shaad Ali [Bunty Aur Babli, Call My Agent: Bollywood] is called Bloody Brothers, and stars Jaideep Ahlawat, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub, Tina Desai, Shruti Seth, Maya Alagh et al in key roles.
Bloody Brothers begins with the accident that acts as the story’s lynchpin event — even as the action takes us before and after the accident in successive episodes, we keep on receiving multiple points of view about the accident itself. Two brothers in the hillside town of Ooty — rich, successful, self-centred and domineering lawyer Jaggi [Jaideep Ahlawat] and his younger brother, the quiet, mousy, poetry-spouting bookseller Daljeet [Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub] run over an old man called Samuel Alvarez late at night. They decide to cover up said accident, confident in the knowledge that the old man was a cancer patient and that nobody had seen them or their car.
Of course, this sets off a chain of events that reveals a much wider set of characters than the beleaguered brothers. There’s Sophie [Tina Desai], the late Samuel’s niece who seems to have a violent, unspecified past, Dushyant [Sacred Games’ excellent Jitendra Joshi] the drunkard private detective who works for Jaggi on-and-off, Sheila [Maya Alagh] the peeping tom neighbour with the sunglasses and the sinister affect. Each of the first season’s six episodes follows one character and deconstructs their origins, their motives and how they choose to deal with Samuel Alvarez’s death and the subsequent police investigation.
Is the show any good? Well, it starts off on a strangely sluggish note, given that the most emotionally high-stakes thing that can happen in a story happens in the first ten minutes itself. Ahlawat and Ayyub immediately vanish into their characters, ably supported by Desai and Joshi. But the writing in the first couple of episodes is very uneven, as though there was no consensus about the preferred tonality and register. You might be fooled into thinking this is a straight ‘howdunit’ after watching the first two episodes.
However, the show course-corrects from Episode Three onwards and becomes the blend of comedy and crime fiction it always wanted to be.
This has always been the preferred narrative style of director Shaad Ali, whether it’s Bunty Aur Babli, or the much less accomplished Kill Dil we’re talking about. Ali’s characters inhabit a kind of desi noir reality, typically far away from Delhi or Bombay [indeed, characters in his films are often fleeing from the big city, as Desai’s character Sophie is here]. Their crimes are marked by a sense of amateur-friendly, DIY inevitability, as though they want to say, ‘this is how India works, get with the programme!’
I quite enjoyed the black comedic touches from Episode Three onwards. Jaggi and Daljeet’s repartee is marked by the former’s impatience as much as the latter’s genteel nature, and this leads to some Laurel-and-Hardy-esque hijinks, even as more than one player is uncovering the brothers’ truth on their own. Joshi is also excellent at balancing Dushyant’s comic Bihari notes with more cold-blooded, strictly-business aspects. The real surprise package, however, is veteran Maya Alagh, a familiar face for Doordarshan viewers in the late 80s and early 90s, who plays Sheila the devious neighbour here. Alagh [who also happens to be the mother-in-law of Applause Entertainment’s CEO Sameer Nair] is a delight to watch as the scheming, borderline sociopathic Sheila.
Satish Kaushik makes an appearance in the latter episodes as Handa, a character that seems to be heavily inspired by the Marvel character Kingpin [and the Pulp Fiction character Marsellus Wallace, played by Ving Rhames], right down to the camera angles and lighting etc when we see him onscreen. Ali could have made this character a little less derivative—Handa even has the habit of narrating a qissa or a short parable and then telling the listener that so-and-so pitiable character from the story represents them. This same bullying style was famously employed by the Bunty Aur Babli cop character Dashrath Singh, played by Amitabh Bachchan. I’m not saying I did not enjoy Kaushik’s performance — it’s just, they could have tried a slightly different mannerism/tic, too.
Bloody Brothers does just enough, in the end, to keep the audience engaged and on the edge of their seats. The performances, especially, are rather good throughout the season even if the writers are caught napping on occasion. Hopefully, the second season will iron out some of these errors.
Bloody Brothers is streaming on ZEE5.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.
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