For really long, extra-marital affairs in Bollywood films have been depicted with an accurate amount of hawwww. It’s been reduced to simple instances, like a bored housewife finding a lipstick mark on her husband’s shirt. Or for that matter, watching him read something on his phone, and smiling. And when the wife finally confronts her man, there is an appropriate amount of melodrama/meltdown/howling. Yes, in Bollywood, it’s generally the man who cheats.
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Which is why Mansi Jain’s Chhuri cuts through the clutter, and manages an identity of its own. The film offers a practical and mature take on extra-marital affairs. The thing about an affair is that it’s often hidden in plain sight. What if the wronged spouse gently opens the curtains on it, without losing their mind? Will that take away the ‘spice’ of the extra-marital relationship? Probably. That’s the question at the heart of this wonderfully breezy short film.
Starring Anurag Kashyap, Surveen Chawla and a brilliant Tisca Chopra, the film starts on a Sunday morning. The ‘wife’ (Tisca Chopra) is making parathas (the sanskaari version of ‘make me a sandwich’) even as the husband (Anurag Kashyap) is spread out on the couch reading a newspaper. Soon after his phone buzzes, he needs to take off for ‘some work’. Everyone knows where he’s headed, and pretends like they don’t. Especially Tisca Chopra’s Meera, who has a monk-like calmness to her. She proceeds to catch him red-handed, and once again when you expect fireworks between the wife and the mistress (Surveen Chawla), the film takes another twist.
It’s 2017, where tears and catfights have been left far behind. Instead, Meera unleashes a fresh kind of psychological warfare on the mistress: catching both her and the husband off-guard. Secrets come out and things take a turn for the hilarious. Watch the whole movie here:
After last year’s brilliant, Chutney, the duo of Mansi Jain and Tisca Chopra have once again made a film they can both be proud of.
