For want of Leila, the plot was lost!
Seldom do you find a show whose star cast makes you nostalgic. I can’t remember the last time I saw the dapper Rahul Khanna on screen — he’s only all over my Insta feed, fashion pages in glossies, or hosting most-coveted style awards. Netflix’s Leila gave us a glimpse of him and I was instantly hooked.
Siddharth, another example, was a favourite since Rang De Basanti, but his Twitter persona is what I’m really a fan of. And he was in Leila too.
But it was really going to be all about Huma Qureshi. From Gangs Of Wasseypur to Jolly LLB 2, it just always felt as though her true potential has haven’t been exploited yet.
And Deepa Mehta in charge now to extract that, it just felt right, it made sense that these actors, such a story will all come together.
It’s often the case that you go in with a lot of expectation and come out utterly underwhelmed. Leila — with everything I just mentioned above — was that.
As is the case with Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), the novel the Netflix series is based on, we’re following the life of Shalini (Huma), a grade 5 Hindu (Hindu’s are graded in this dystopian reality, and 5 is the highest), who is married to Riz (Rahul), a Muslim. They have a child — Leila — a mixed breed.
Now only if I were talking about animals. But I’m not. In 2047, Aryavarta (loosely based on India and its alleged guerrilla Hindufication) is a land where ‘purity’ is coveted, and in order to achieve that everything impure must be eliminated — including mixed-blood children. When a bunch of goons attack Shalini and Riz and take away Leila, the story starts — and it’s Shalini’s pursuit to find her daughter that keeps the ball rolling.
The country is divided into communities, separated by tall, un-scalable walls — if you’re picturing a famous President and his dream of putting up walls around his country, you’re not alone. Each entry point is fiercely guarded by repeaters who check your papers, frisk you to make sure you’re not carrying anything illegal —which could be anything between songs of Faix Ahmed Faiz to free will — and finally scan a tattoo on your wrist to get your papers. Well, it’s not really a tattoo, it’s a chip actually with all your data — kind of like wearing your Adhaar Card on your sleeves.
Water and clean air are luxuries that the rich buy because they can afford it, and the poor — who live in bastis that all look like Dharavi outside the community walls — crave. Reorientation or transformation centres operate to bring the lost back onto the right path — through rigorous and torturous means of abstinence, of course, along with mind games, as and when required.
Aryavarta is constantly under surveillance, so they know if you’re deviating from the right path. There’s really no escape. Yet, rebels and revolutionaries exist who’re toiling away to expose Aryavarta’s hypocrisy.
Siddharth, an equivalent of a cop in Aryavarta is eventually revealed to be a rebel fighting to overturn this totalitarian regime from the inside — no, that’s not a spoiler. The attack on Shalini and Riz turn out to be triggered by personal vendetta and not a pursuit of purity. And after eight episodes of looking at Sanjay Suri’s posters as the leader of Aryavarta, you finally get to see him.
Yet underwhelmed is what you’d feel when you close the Netflix window, and instead of marinating in the show that you just watched, you find yourself reaching for a re-run of Friends. That’s what I did.
The twists are predictable, the intensity is not palpable, and the screenplay just incapable of holding everything together. Yes, we get the dystopian reality of fear you’re trying to create. Now what? There is chaos, and while as an audience you might be getting sucked into it, a good script is supposed to turn chaos into a ladder to help the audience out. That necessarily doesn’t mean a happy ending — just one that’s cohesive. And Leila lacked that.
If Netflix is actually vying for a second season — hence the sloppy ball drop — then that’s just trickery, guys.
Acting-wise, both Huma and Siddharth do a good job — the perks of casting good actors, right? Huma feels Shalini’s pain, while Siddharth maintains the carefully-constructed hard exterior he uses to guard his inner rebel. And Rahul does what he does best — simmer slowly in a white shirt!
Right after the release of the trailer, Leila was accused of propagating Hinduphobia that left Twitterati divided, for most of us believed that Leila has much, much more to offer. Unfortunately, I have little to defend Leila with now.