Hush Hush, Intriguing , Involving Intimate Study Of Crime & Redemption

Hush  Hush(Amazon Prime  Video, 7 Episodes)

Starring  Juhi Chawla, Soha Ali Khan, Kritika Kamra, Shahana Goswami,Karishma Tanna

Created and  Directed by Tanuja Chandra

Rating: *** ½

This is a very goodlooking police procedural with some  beautiful actresses getting together  to  play  bestfriends for life, and in one case,  in death.

Juhi Chawla, looking like an older version of  Sanya Malhotra,   in a classic case of  a monstrous  miscast plays Ishi Sangmitra , a high-flying wheelerdealer  who  gets  savagely slayed in  the  first episode…or is  it the second? It becomes a little  tough to keep  track when the narrative moves forward and  back without warning.

What is  as clear as daylight (ironical, that, since  most of the  series is shot during well-lit night-time activities) is that Ishi is  up to no good and a lot of the characters feel she had it coming.In one drawingroom interrogation a powerful industrialist   actually laughs  in  cop Tehlan(Karishma  Tanna)’s  face and says, “God is looking…God is great.”

The look of  disgust that Tanna gives this tactless gloater  made my day, although I must confess at seven episodes ,  each of almost one hour’s length, this series could do with a sizeable  amount of pruning.

What keeps one glued  right till the  end is the  question: where is  this  going? More importantly, the principal actresses have the looks and  sometimes the skills , though not always, to make us partially involved. Shahana Goswami  is  as usual  the  stand-out among the  five principal actresses. Shahana’s Zaira  is  a star-dressdesigner dealing with the  bipolar moodiness  of  a co-worker which I found to be of no relevance  to the plot.

Soha Ali Khan’s   Saiba is a bit of  a tantrum-thrower and  largely devoted to only herself although there is a caring husband  and two  lovely children in her.

Kritika Kamra as Dolly is the second most enlivening protagonist. Dolly is  sick and tired  of her mother-in-law’s  demands for  a  baby. She has quit her marriage, though her husband is  not an a..hole at all.

My favourite  moment in the series features Kamra’s Dolly  and  Saiba’s little  boy at a  vending machine at  the  hospital  where   after a near-fatal assault  on the  boy’s father,the boy asks  Dolly if his father would die and  become a star in the sky.

“Aise thode na  star  bann jata hai koi,” Dolly  replies with  a distant look in her eyes,  almost as  if   the pretty actress was looking at her own struggle .

It is interesting to see the  husbands being painted in  believable strokes  of empathy in this  chic chick flick. In spite of women  taking centrestage  the spouses are  sketched  with care and they have a  role to play in the plot.

The  problem here is  one   of pacing.  The  narration at times slackens and needs  a good shake  by  the shoulder.I still don’t know  what exactly Ayesha  Jhulka, with  a  fake Bengali accent,   is  doing  in the plot. Or how  the  plot  hurled   from being  about  girl bonding to  child trafficking.  But if  you stay put till the end,  Hush Hush is  a rewarding experience.