Radhika Apte, ZEE5's Mrs Undercover: Abort This Mission
This is #CriticalMargin where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative about new Hindi films and shows.
Apr 21, 2023
Detail from the poster for Mrs Undercover. ZEE5
Watch Mrs. Undercover on OTTPlay.
MRS UNDERCOVER is the kind of film that has every reason to exist but no reason to be the way it becomes. It is the kind of film that rewardingly mounts the female protagonist as the face of the outing but spends every running minute reducing her to a caricature. Filmmaker Anushree Mehta’s venture is so ridiculous in execution that it single-handedly reinforces our faith in children’s ability to write sensible stories because, as evidenced by the film, the adults have clearly failed us.
Having said that, I’d like to believe that at some granular level the film had the potential to work. A housewife in Kolkata, unseen by her husband, son and in-laws, and recognised only through domestic labour, is revealed to be a special agent. Think of The Family Man but headlined by a woman. That she is traditionally bound within the four walls of the house only accentuates her underdog status, making the impending revelation only more fulfilling. But Mehta’s film possesses no humour nor whimsicality necessary for such a premise to sing. Instead the film barters absurdity for comicality, eventually culminating as such a witless affair that it is a marvel that it took two people (Mehta and Abir Sengupta) to write this.
Durga (Radhika Apte) lives with her family in Kolkata. Her in-laws are dependent on her, so is her husband (Saheb Chatterjee) and son. She is clumsy but adeptly manages everything at home. Also in the city is a serial killer (Sumeet Vyas) on the loose. He has a specification of course. Misogyny is his superpower and feminism is his trigger. He hates empowered women, to the extent of feeling physically ill at their sight. Termed as a “common man” (probably a jibe at the ubiquity at the condition which marks the film’s sole attempt at displaying some smarts), he has been tricking police and women. At some point, the chief of the special force (Rajesh Sharma) discovers that Durga is an undercover agent staying in the city, forgotten by the force for years.
It takes something for a film to fire poorly from all grounds. Characters in Mrs Undercover don’t talk, they dump exposition. When a group of officers talk about the ‘common man’, one of them states that he only attacks strong women. The other chimes in saying that he has been evading arrest for years now. All this is vital information but the film uses dialogues as a shorthand to fill in narrative gaps. At least twice I found myself saying aloud, “You don’t say” in an empty room. Then there are the characters which can be best described as props. The montages in Durga’s household are so generically staged that they seem straight out of a mustard oil advertisement. People in the film are not written but inserted as adjectives. The “supportive” mother-in-law (Laboni Sarkar), the “senile” father-in-law (Biswajit Chakraborty), the “chauvinistic” husband whose favourite pastime is deriding Durga as a “housewife” .
This ludicrousness is extended to more crucial aspects. Like, we are told that the ‘common man’ has a covert group who are working overtime to, what else but, kill “strong” women. But then who are they and, if I may ask, what are they? I get that they hate women but there ought to be some context to justify the trouble they are undertaking by killing them, especially in a country that ensures female existence is fairly torturous. But then going on against only them would be unfair. Mrs Undercover makes even the special force look like a team of jesters who spend most of their time wearing wigs and fake moustaches. At some level, I feel such a simplistic narrative was probably deliberate, telling of the director’s intent of designing her spy film in the grammar of comic book gaudiness. But then, Mehta’s Mrs Undercover has no semblance of the required pulpiness, unfolding instead with the nonchalance of a school skit. It says something that Vyas, an interesting casting choice, essays his role with a sort of jocular vacuity like he is always one page short of keeping up with the script.
Which finally brings me to the pièce de résistance of the mess: Radhika Apte. Needless to say she is a gifted actor and so popular that her expressions have been archived in the internet’s memory. Apte is painfully one-note in the film, her expressions limited to getting surprised again.. and again…and again. Even watching her memes has provided more joy.
With everything so horribly wrong with the film, the one aspect that really sticks out is its understanding of women, her strength and sacrifices. Durga, evidently named after the goddess, is shown to be a superwoman of sorts. She can manage home and beat up goons with the same ease. This, the film insists, is the true power of a housewife. But is labour really a superpower? Mrs Undercover goes forth and obscenely glorifies a housewife’s work without looking at a scenario where it need not have to be the case. Deifying a woman is an offshoot of misogyny, not a solution to it.
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