Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein: Just As Subversive, In S2

Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein: A Gutsier Season 2, With A Twisted Love Story

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows

WHEN a man chooses a woman, it is a love story. But when a woman chooses a man, it is chaos. At least this is the hypothesis on which Sidharth Sengupta’s pulpy romantic thriller Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein rests. In the first season, the Netflix show unfolded as an atypical tale of obsession where the reversal of gender roles wreaked havoc, subverting allusions and sneaking in commentaries about masculinity that only strengthened in its runtime.

Vikrant Singh Chauhan (Tahir Raj Bhasin), fondly called Vicky, is Shah Rukh Khan in the unmaking. Trapped in a show named after a Khan film, Baazigar, and held captive to the duality of the actor’s character in it (the bespectacled Ajay Sharma plots revenge and becomes Vicky Malhotra to exact revenge), Vicky is an everyman wanting to transition to a hero. And his inability to do so comprised the tragedy.

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He, however, was all primed to be. Son of a servile father, Vicky had different plans for himself. He finished his engineering, got the girl of his choice, Shikha (Shweta Tripathi), and just when he was readying to take a leap to start his life and be the hero of his story, Purva (Anchal Singh) came into the picture. Privileged and obsessive, she chose him, and her corrupt politician father Akheraj Awasthi (Saurabh Shukla) ensured that his daughter got what she wanted.

The merit of Sengupta’s show resided in drawing out an ordinary male character who refuses to accept his ordinariness. Frustrated by the cruel blow life dealt him, Vikrant made one plan after another, including but not limited to, hiring goons to kill Purva. Yet, every time he came close to accomplishing it, his plans were foiled. Purva remained alive and his life was upended.

All this demands reiteration because a host of what works in the sophomore season is tied to the way Sengupta crafted the series from the beginning. The self-absorption of Vikrant’s character, which is in equal parts tragic and unlikeable, posits him perpetually at the edge. He seems too conscientious to be outrightly evil and too entitled to settle for his present. In that sense, the promise of a second season opened up as a reason for the makers to furnish reasons for that tilt to happen. Given that Vikrant’s hired assassin (Arunoday Singh) outsmarts him and kidnaps Purva for money, threatening in the process to reveal his involvement in the whole thing, his move to the dark side seems inevitable.

What makes the second season (Umesh Padalkar and Sengupta have written the story and Saurabh Shukla is credited as the script consultant) such a worthy follow-up is its refusal to settle for easy binaries. The six-episode series is gutsy and audacious for forging its own path and committing to it right till the end. Expectantly, Vikrant takes the cleaver and holds a gun, he kills people and marches on a bloody field to take charge of his life and yet Sengupta underpins these images with a strange romanticism, bringing to mind the crazed lunacy of Vikrant Massey’s character in Haseen Dillruba. The suggestion is strangely warped and almost perverse: what if this arrangement, of Vikrant gunning for Purva’s life and yet not being able to do so, is the love story at the heart of things? What if they are fated to be together? Or worse, they are fated to be together and only like this?

Such a reading opens up a fascinating lens to view the show, rendering facile labels like ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ redundant and also recalibrating our impression of the characters. One can always argue that in many ways, the show was always a love story with Vikrant and Shikha struggling to overcome impossible odds to be together. But Sengupta takes things a notch higher and indicates that perhaps it was Shikha who was the third wheel and no matter how depraved the insinuation is, it is what it is. The unexpectedness of this is what makes Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein such an arresting show.

Love is not just the primary concern of the outing, it informs everything else. It is what drives one character to save another (Gurmeet Choudhary as Guru, a man hopelessly in love with Purva, is immensely effective) with selfless devotion. It is what makes a father take every twisted route in the book for his daughter, it is what makes a man become the worst version of himself, and it is what propels a woman to hold a gun and charge at armed men.

The performances help. There is something about the way Singh essays the role of Purva that not only adds to the show's complexity but also makes it difficult to streamline a reading about her. Bhasin continues to deliver a career-defining turn as Vikrant, a man refusing to accept the fate he has been handed over. His eyes are constantly shifting, his body is always alert like he is a lizard trapped in a human body (it is a compliment). Some lighter false notes include a redundant treatment of Golden, Vikrant’s best friend. The entire subplot is done with such unnecessary excess that it runs against the ethos of the series.

But the things that work go a long haul. Like the outing’s refusal to mend the fragility of the man at the centre of the narrative, like allowing him only the premises of washrooms (a space traditionally associated with granting privacy to women) to express himself. Like letting a woman choose a man and dubbing it as a love story.

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