Lafangey Deserves Our Love, Respect & Attention

Rating: ****

   I may be wrong , but MX Player  is perceived as  a platform for casual viewing. It was only  by chance that I switched on to this series featuring an unknown co-directors Prem  Mistry and Abhishek Yadav(take  a  bow)   and a cast of relatively unknown talent.

I had decided to watch one episode  at the  most…I finally watched  every single  episode , wall  to wall, came away  enormously  impressed  by the writing which allows not only the three protagonists, the Lafangeys(why this  tawdry title , it makes the employment-challenged  leads sound like wastrels  from a Guddu  Dhanoa action film) to  breathe  and grow, but also the  people  who populate their  thirsty lives.

To cite  an example, the  househelp Sonu(Ranjan Raj) is someone so relatable  he feels like  a member  of our household. Appreciably,  Sonu’s character is not  emblematized  to  accentuate  the democratic spirit. He is organically a part  of Kamlesh and his  father’s family, almost the maternal presence  missing in their  household.

Or take Rohan(Gagan Arora)’s elder  brother, a man who, like Pratik Gandhi in the wonderful  Do Aur Do  Pyar, feels he has somewhere  missed the bus, or even more interestingly, Rohan’s Bhabhi, so calm,  reasonable trying to  keep  the family together….All these  are characters so vivid and  obtainable, they feel  like people we have met. And met quite recently.

Kamlesh, played with a winking gusto by Harsh Beniwal, wants to be an actor.  But he has very limited talent: this, he comes to know  when an adoring junior with genuine talent shows up. Kamlesh’s journey is potholed, humiliating, humbling and  bumpy: who said life for a wannabe Salman is easy?

If Harsh Beniwal is so  convincing as Kamlesh, it is  in all likehood because the actor has faced  much of  the character’s rejections.

Gagan Arora as  Rohan, my favourite   of the three…errrr, Lafangaze, is  again convincing as a love-smitten transit-Romeo. I have seen Gagan in some secondary roles. Here he  comes  into his own as a young man whose  life  is defined  by his love for the pretty  Ishita(Barkha Singh, who plays  Pankaj  Tripathi’s  assistant in the  brilliant Criminal Justice 4).

What happens when love fades on one side only, what happen on the other  side? Gagan Arora as the jilted stranded  loverboy is  brilliant:  vulnerable, pitiable,  solidly  malleable . He is  a revelation. That he gets  some  of  the best lines and scenes(don’t forget to thank the  writers Abhishek Yadav, Ankit Yadav) works to  Gagan’s advantage.

The weakest  of  the three plots is the  one featuring the rise and fall of Chaitanya(Anud Singh  Dhaka). His  story  in  spite of its life-defining moments, comes across more as Agneepath than  Dil  Chahta Hai.  Chaitanya’s outbursts  about why he sold his soul to the devil, sound  echoic in a series where almost every line feels organic.

More interesting than Chaitanya is  his  sister Chetna(played by the  naturally gifted Saloni Gaur) who  refuses to be taken in by her  brother’s sudden  affluence  and  who would rather risk her rickety scootie breaking down  on a deserted  highway than buying a new one with her brother’s ill-gotten wealth.

I would  like to know where Chetna’s righteousness takes  her in life. I would  also like to know where  all the  other characters , good, badgered  and never ugly, will head after the  end  of the show.Will Kamlesh’s father actually will  his grocery store to the househelp Sonu?

Written with a remarkable  flair for the rhythms  of  workingclass  life, Lafangey fills that  lacuna in  our streaming viewing for a series that doesn’t step into the workingclass puddle  as a tourist .