A middle-aged widow (Madhuri Dixit) finds herself in a ‘killer’ soup. She is stuck with the dead body of a next-door neighbour (Ravi Kishan) in her living room. It’s the middle of the night. The panic-stricken woman calls up both her Patna-based daughters — the older one (Triptii Dimri) who slaves away at her husband’s home, and the younger one (Dharna Durga) who’s desperate to go viral as an influencer. The two warring sisters arrive at their mother’s the next morning and wonder how to solve the crisis. When they ask her what happened, she narrates an over-elaborate adventure of self-defense. It sounds like a farfetched lie; they do not believe her. But they go about dealing with the body anyway. What follows is a quirky small-town dramedy that features the squabbling and spirited ladies, the man’s suspicious family, a kidnapping case, a lovelorn cop, an entitled husband, a bag of cash, an upcoming wedding, and a cryptic ransom call.
You think you know what to expect with Maa Behen: a cheeky and subversive take on female rage and empowerment in a comically patriarchal place. It’s a familiar template; the madness is not new. But the method is. In most movies, the three women would’ve leaned into the popular impression of them as the ‘weaker gender’ and used it to their advantage to wade through a crime caper. But Maa Behen, written by Pooja Tolani and directed by Suresh Triveni, is not most movies. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in recent memory, and I mean that in the best way possible.
There’s a tonal ingenuity to the film. It is cheeky and subversive, of course, but it takes a riskier route to arrive at similar observations. The female protagonists do lean into their reputation, but the reputation is not that they are weak or incapable of murder; it’s that they are loose-charactered and manipulative sirens who’ve spent their lives honey-trapping hapless men and boys. More importantly, it’s not just the central characters who weaponise the male gaze they’re subjected to; the film itself weaponises the gaze. It’s a big swing, nearly as if the film-making is supposed to reflect the prejudices and ingrained misogyny of a society that’s wired to distort the identity and agency of womanhood.
Take the exaggerated pitch of the storytelling. It adopts the campy language of sensationalist true-crime shows: in this case a Sansani-coded serial called Khalbali. The ‘backstories’ of all the three women are presented in this format, where the dramatic anchor (who else but Shrivardhan Trivedi) introduces all the lore and sexism as heightened fact. A slanderous picture is painted of Rekha, the sultry widow with a penchant for sleeveless blouses, extramarital affairs, lustful intent, shady professions and dead husbands. A saucy picture is painted of Jaya, the crafty daughter from Rekha’s first husband, who apparently enticed her way into a prosperous family of five men. A scandalous picture is painted of Sushma, the daughter from Rekha’s unseen lover, who kissed her way to online infamy, got banished from the self-respecting neighbourhood, and promptly went on to seduce Jaya’s husband. The pitch extends to much of the way the film is shot, whimsically scored and cut. The volume is never low, whether it’s the spoofy characters or the designer-middle-class production value.
This treatment is generally inventive to watch, but it’s far smarter when it’s baked into the perspective of the film. Most of us smile along with the creativity and get entertained by it, and perhaps that’s the point. The women are defined by dark myths, half-truths and rumours about them: the kind that spread like wildfire in gossipy colonies and WhatsApp groups. Rekha is seen as a murky witch who casts her spell on victims (an early shot even shows her twisted feet) and buries them in her garden, while her daughters are stigmatised and fetishised through the ‘medium’ of storytelling. It’s almost like the film is confessing to its own complicity in how pop-culture and a post-truth media landscape cater to the whims of a male-dominated nation. Replace the motif of gender with the motif of religion or caste, and the same gimmick would hold. The family of women could be a family of Muslims or Dalits, and the story would play between the blurred lines of perception and reality. But it wouldn’t be as playful.
The performances commit to the tricky duality. There’s a sense of harmony and rhythm between the female actors in a film that requires them to both play along and shatter the illusion: to submit and defy. It’s refreshing to see Madhuri Dixit dabble in physical satire, but it’s also depth masquerading as satire. She channels her mainstream Bollywood legacy the moment a scene needs to switch from farcical to furious. Triptii Dimri stages Jaya as a potent mix of Bulbbul-like intrigue (where she actually turned out to be a man-eating witch), an Animal-like gaze and Dhadak 2-like gravitas; there’s an explosive and genre-shifting scene that Dimri owns, driving home the narrative subterfuge in one fell swoop. Dharna Durga is unfiltered and charmingly human as Sushma, a character that could’ve so easily become a comic-relief device. She more than holds her own, crafting a rapport with Dimri that shapes much of their petty sibling angst. Geetanjali Kulkarni is predictably good as the missing man’s wife: a woman who’s told herself stories about her husband to stay blissfully in denial.
The film loses some of its intensity with a cameo, a police stakeout, and plot contrivances about the ransom call. But one of the more intuitive tracks revolve around how the stepsisters and mother turn on each other at home at the drop of a hat; they slut-shame one another and spew accusations that are derived from the very rumours and urban legends that haunt them. Their distrust stems from the patriarchy pummeled into them, for they are too conditioned and afraid to question the lofty stories and allegations against them. It’s almost like they see themselves and their own world through the lens of society — until they don’t. The devil is in the details. The address of their home is 333 Kripa Niwas, which is half the devil’s number (666). Their names are Rekha, Jaya and Sushma: three of the four names (a Hema isn’t far behind) in the iconic ad jingle for Nirma washing powder, a product peddled in the hues of mainstream chauvinism. The title, Maa Behen (“Mother Sisters”), is a nod to the gender-centricity of Hindi slurs. The opening shot of Jaya playing a violent game on her phone while waiting at an IVF clinic foreshadows the tenor that follows. The evenness of patriarchy is echoed through a visual gag of Jaya’s brothers-in-law being identical triplets.
I like that, despite its excesses, the premise is more about women having to prove themselves in an age of irresponsible storytelling and mythmaking. They remain as complicated as anyone else: from gambling habits to poor romantic decisions. They’re just held to a different standard and morally assassinated for the same mistakes. I also like that it’s not so much about revenge and other cinematic tropes that this genre tends to position. At some level, the film taps into the average viewer’s biases and invites us to participate, before skillfully hitting us with a few hard truths. Every now and then, we hear a different perspective of the ‘tea’ that was so artfully sold to us: the erased facts within the packaged fantasies. These make for powerful moments, because they hold a mirror to the symbiotic relationship between who we are and what we choose to believe; between socially entrenched insecurities and the misfits we malign to feel better about ourselves.
After all, it’s simpler to fabricate stories that cushion the distinctly Indian resistance to those who live on their own terms. What would everyone do if that woman who smokes doesn’t actually run a seedy massage parlour, or the guy who eats meat everyday isn’t a spy from across the border? Imagine the horror, then, of confronting the duplicity of ourselves. Imagine the horror of reimagining a detergent ad jingle as a feminist anthem. Cleverly mounted movies like Maa Behen seduce us in a music we understand while at once deconstructing the lyrics.