The Broken But Beautiful Season 3 Review: It Is Broken And Not Quite So Beautiful!

Starring  Siddharth Shukla, Sonia Rathee, Ehan Bhat

Directed  by  Priyanka  Ghose

Rating: ** ½

The  Broken But Beautiful  series—I don’t think it can be called a franchise—is all about falling in love  with the  wrong person to a degree of  utter self-annihilation.  This idea was explored with  some amount  sensitivity in  the previous season  where Harleen Sethi kept obsessing over a man who dumped her while Vikrant Massey waited his turn.

Now it’s  Siddharth Shukla’s turn to  “fall”  so  hard and deep  into the  bottomless  pit  of love that he  can’t see his own ego any longer. It’s a challenging role  for a  semi-newcomer.Shukla  gives  his best shot, exposing  his arrogant theatre-director Agastya’s  character’s  vulnerable  side, pleading  and begging  in love(watch him struggle with his conflicted  emotions in  the  big confrontation sequence  in  episode 6)  as mid-way through the series he  falls for the  spoilt rich bitch Rumi(Sonia Rathee).

 Now  here is where  I have a  problem with the storyline(flimsy and  flighty as  it is). I can’t see why  anyone would fall for a girl-woman as self-obsessed as Rumi. She has  a  problem with everyone including her  kid-sister Maira(Saloni Khanna, dignified) who steals away  Rumi’s childhood crush Ishaan(Ehan Bhat, the  loverboy from Rahman’s  99, bringing  in much-needed restraint  into the  performing card of this  hyper-ventilating melodrama).

Maira in  fact compares  most favourably with Rumi. At one point  Rumi tells her sister. “We all know what  you’re going to suck on  tonight”

   Though  lines  such as this really suck,  it’s a welcome change to see  the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ as so flawed and fractured so broken and not so beautiful. But somewhere  the writing  goes overboard  in taking the protagonist on  the  other  side of the moral spectrum. Rumi is  shown picking up a  guy on  the road and  having sex with him .  Agastya is constantly indulging in what he calls  ‘tomfuckery’ a distant cousin  of ‘tomfoolery’ where  you have sex with anything that  moves.

 The  end-result is a mixed  cocktail  of  two  protagonists who deserve one another for all the wrong reasons. They are both  self-serving  jerks with no redeeming quality except their determination to get what they want. The series is  set  in the elitist  world  of  English  theatre in Mumbai , names  like Samuel Becket, Ibsen and Olivia ‘Fucking’ Coleman(Agastya’s  description)  are dropped  to create  an impression of intellectual  elevation.But Gulzar’s Libaas, this ain’t.

Alas,  everything is  roundly shallow in the series. No amount of  names-dropping can  stop these people from looking like  a bunch of over-privileged  brats who  don’t know a  day’s honest  work. But  the show is interesting for that  very reason. The characters occupy their cloistered world with  such smug self-satisfaction  that their deeds misdeeds and misadventures  appear  to be, in  Agastya words,  epic chutiyapa.