If I had an Indian Rupee for every neo-noir crime drama that features a haunted-and-disgraced cop with a drinking problem, buried trauma, a grieving subordinate and a gloomy colour palette, I’d be wealthy enough to not care about the weak conversion rate when I buy currency for a foreign trip. The eponymous protagonist of Brown is so brooding that she’d give Dracula a pale-faced complex. Rita Brown (Karisma Kapoor) rolls her own cigarettes for good measure; every puff she takes is punctuated with loud crackles of burning and inhalation so that we hear the emptiness of her soul. She misses her dead husband (Shaan) and dead unborn child.
It’s imperative to be miserable. Arjun Sinha (Surya Sharma), her deputy on a twisted new investigation, misses his dead wife and kid while living with a dementia-afflicted father (K.K. Raina). The setting is modern-day Kolkata (but is there such a thing?), everyone is either sad or creepy or both, every house is lit like an antique lamp and souvenir museum, and the gruesome murder of a young woman from an influential family draws out uneasy truths that can be slotted under “Just Bengal Things”. Adapted from Abheek Barua’s novel City of Death, the darkness of this seven-episode series is a cultural aesthetic: overproduced and overcooked to the point of visual fatigue. I like ‘atmospheric’ shows as much as the next tired film critic, but Brown uses waves of texture and social fabric (to put it mildly: the city overacts) to offset a standard premise with no surprises and cliches galore. It’s middling at best, and the perfect prototype for new-age thrillers that conceal a hollow core with ornate world-building.
You can tell that Brown keeps finding ways to stretch out scenes and conversations, adding personal-life tracks and expanding time in order to justify its stature as long-form entertainment. It stops short of adding an afternoon nap or two. I’m not going to say it could’ve been a film. But I can say that the series employs so much padding and vibes — like the characters of Rita’s mother (Soni Razdan) and aunt (Helen Khan), Arjun’s dad, or the random track of two cyber-crime dudes working together — that Brown is consumed by its own colour. They work as neither diversions nor fillers. Most detective stories thrive on domestic strife and broken-home scenes, but this is a mood piece that sips on expensive scotch. Every other frame calls for attention. Smoke wafts out of lips and artificial light falls onto faces in precise manners. It’s almost too good-looking to be engaging; it’s also too obsessed with its own reflection in the mirror to be smarter.
The gaze is also a bit troubling, almost like the show is fetishising the city as some meditation on a hedonistic society that hides behind its liberalism, artistic image and seemingly progressive men. Even if the intent is to show the complicity of community and family in the violence against women, Brown is one-note in its exploration of this motif. Rita and Arjun look into the usual suspects and predators: a pervert stepbrother (who likes having sex with teenagers in school dresses), an abusive father-in-law, a wife who looks the other way, an ex-boyfriend having an affair with the victim’s best friend, a gay husband, and so on. No character is allowed to be ordinary. Being functional is a crime. The plot bides its time and gets convoluted when politicians, powerful players and media anchors make the two cops jump through hoops for wanting to do their job without agendas. At some point, I stopped paying attention and still didn’t miss any information before the finale. I suppose that’s what they call ambient viewing, except the genre itself is not designed to sustain such passive interest.
The social revelation of the killer is fine on paper, because it exposes how everyday abuse pushes women left with no hope into the arms of monsters who pose as safe spaces. But as a narrative device, it’s frustratingly predictable because of the casting. At first, you think the obviousness of the role is the red herring; it has to be someone else. But lo and behold, the twist is that the twist is desperate to be one. The motive is also wonky, and those classic symptoms emerge in the finale: the killer behaves sinisterly the moment their identity is clear, and the other suspects start acting like humans once they’re off the hook. Dialogue like “love is my biggest fear because, for me, love is death” and “I am alive because I chose life” at crucial junctures do not help matters.
Of the supporting cast, Surya Sharma is indistinguishable from his similar role in Search: The Naina Murder Case as the poker-faced subordinate of a female detective. That’s not to say he isn’t effective, but it would be nice to see more dimensions and subtext (like Barun Sobti in Kohrra, perhaps). As pleasant as it is to see Soni Razdan and Helen Khan banter about as two Scottish-Indian sisters in Kolkata, their characters merely exist because they can. Every time we see famous faces with less screen-time, it raises suspicions about their purpose in a story that keeps second-guessing itself.
Karisma Kapoor is very watchable, like Kareena Kapoor Khan in The Buckingham Murders, but her Rita Brown is too much of a literary formula to make a dent. It’s a studied depiction of a sullen protagonist that’s too common across mediums. But Rita has nothing on Kolkata, the ultimate sadboi-hours canon of Rabindra Sangeet montages and Chinatown informants. The city aura-farms like nobody’s business (alternate title: Brown is the Warmest Colour), but unfortunately, it remains a smokescreen. I wouldn’t blame Brown for blindly following the template, but I’d blame Brown for simultaneously doing too much with it and not doing enough with it.