Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo review: Dimple Kapadia's feminist desi Narcos is colossal waste of great concept

Director: Homi Adajania

Cast: Dimple Kapadia, Angira Dhar, Radhika Madan, Isha Talwar, Naseeruddin Shah, Ashish Verma, Varun Mitra, Udit Arora, and Deepak Dobriyal

Where to watch: Disney+ Hotstar

Rating: 2.5 stars

What do you get if you cross Narcos with Weeds and set it in rural Gujarat (or Rann Pradesh as the story calls it for safety purposes). The answer is Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo – a show that sees a family of women in the Rann of Kutch helm a multimillion dollar drug empire, without the men there having any wind of what their mother, sister, and wives are doing. It’s a very interesting concept putting women at the forefront of a badass crime show. But alas, its badassery remains at the concept stage only. In execution, it simply flatlines.

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo is about Rani Ba (Dimple Kapadia), who runs a successful cottage business with her daughter and daughters-in-law. But the whole business is front for a massive cocaine empire, which involves her daughter Kaanta (Radhika Madan) as the scientist, and daughters-in-law Kajal (Angira Dhar) and Bijli (Isha Talwar) as the enforcer and accountant respectively. Kajal and Bijli’s husbands, settled in the US, are blissfully unaware of the real nature of the family business. But it all unravels as the men return to India and Rani Ba is faced with an old adversary in Monk (a sinister Deepak Dobriyal), who is out for her blood.

There is so much potential in this show. It elevates itself from the run-of-the-mill crime dramas but its hook – an all-woman principal cast. The women are badass and the men bumbling idiots. It’s a welcome change, but one that wears off quickly in the absence of cohesive storytelling. A gimmick can only hold your attention to a certain point. Beyond that, it’s the content that must engage you. Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo starts off well, setting up the premise and introducing the characters organically but it gets caught up in trappings of its own soon.

The show’s resorts to the cliches and tropes of the genre far too often, using dialogue that sounds cool but gets cringey too soon, making use of gestures and actions from characters that look on screen but are downright silly and inconsistent. It tries to dazzle you but all that is cosmetic. The heart of the story is still not in the right place.

The biggest mistake the show does is upon introducing Rani Ba’s two sons, it shifts the narrative to them, spending more time on them than necessary. Probably, the attempt was to show this criminal empire through the eyes of outsiders to give audience the same sense of wonder they were feeling. But Homi Adajania does not quite get that right, lingering on sad men when badass women are right there.

The performances, barring few notable exceptions, are nothing home to write about. The veteran Dimple Kapadia nails her role as Rani Ba as was expected of her. She brings the nuance of a powerful woman in a male-dominated field quite well and also perfects the accent needed. Deepak Dobriyal as her nemesis Monk is a treat to watch, although his character tends to go over the top sometimes. But in a rustic gangster drama, that is not always a bad thing. Of the others, I was most impressed by Dhruv Arora and Angira Dhar, who portray slightly unidimensional characters very well.

I have one bone to pick with Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo and that is with its depiction of sexual assault. Graphic depiction of violence against women can serve only two purposes – making the audience feel the pain of the survivor, or titilating the viewers. The latter was extensively used by Hindi films in the 80s and 90s and is the cheapest trick in the book. The former is like walking a tightrope because you need to be sensitive with the scene while being brutal. I feel Flamingo missed that balance somewhere. The scene (I won’t spoil further) is too graphic for my liking and has been shot in a way that it ends up titilating even if it is accidental. It juts out in a show that normally gives its women more respect than that.

In Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo, Homi Adajania brings an entertaining and slick crime drama that is full of action, dialoguebaazi, and seetimaar moments. But it is also riddled with inconsistencies, impractical plot points, and characters that do not make sense. Does the jazz of the action gloss over the shortcomings? That is for the viewer to decide.