How Bhumika nails the ultimate seductress in Imtiaz Ali’s She
With hair tied in a bun and dressed in khakhi, she bears ordinary looks and lives a life that’s more ordinary than her looks. That’s on one layer of the showrunner of Imtiaz Ali’s Netflix series She. On another layer, she is the ultimate seductress and lives a life so happening that many adventure-loving souls would find themselves in the grip of envy.
Bhumika is a chawl-dweller female police official whose mundane life takes a sudden change when a crime branch officer Jason Fernandez (Vishwas Kini) spots her and recruits her to be an undercover agent to expose a drug cartel.
She is introduced onboard mainly because Jason needs to verify the identities of the men he thinks are suspects. Now, the suspects are running rackets so huge that it is impossible their identity is left to be ascertained.
But when it comes to thrillers, the most obvious thing to do is not ask the most obvious questions. It’s a world of imagination where what you did not imagine is meant to happen.
At the centre of this flight of imagination is Bhumika who it seems never imagined anything beyond going to work, listening to men make lurid jokes, come back home to a mother who is coughing her lungs out and her sister Rupa (Shivani Rangole), who flips the finger to middle-class morality.
Whether Bhumika is at ease with this arrangement or wants to run out, we do not know. Her expressions say nothing. Not because she is a bad actor, but because she excels in playing the role of a woman who is just going about life as it is.
We are oblivious to the turmoil in Bhumika like she is unmindful of the seductress she houses in her body. Her first encounter with her sexual desires, and the ability to arouse the same in others, happens when she, disguised as a sex worker, is trying to lay a trap to get Sasya (Vijay Varma) arrested.
She succeeds at the task of getting Sasya behind bars, but is suddenly awakened to her own repressed sexual desires. And that drags her into a trap from which she finds it difficult to free herself.
To get to the kingpin, she has to play the sex worker night after night. In playing the part, Bhumika begins to live it too. She is conscious of this newfound power. She is also scared of it. But she is helpless in the face of it.
Not that she is on some carnal expedition, like a true seductress, she knows when to seduce and when to allow herself to get seduced. She enjoys both parts in equal measure.
Backed by this power to make men fall to her feet, Bhumika sees the White Swan in her stifled as she sends the ‘wrong signals’ to Rupa’s ‘boyfriend’ in a sibling rivalry that is mindful enough of sisterly duty to ‘not cross the line’.
Without a strong plot to hold the series together, Bhumika acts as the glue that binds it all.
Many critics of the series say women are more than just seductresses. True. But they do not answer why only ‘the more’ should be dealt with and not ‘the less’. It is the writer and director who decide which aspect they should pick up.
Many sexologists have been advising ways to women, who cannot enjoy sex, to identify their sexualities. Bhumika finds her way, almost by chance, after having been divorced by her husband for “acting like a corpse in bed”.
Seduction may have been assigned as a role and duty to women, but it is not their sole preserve. They would do well to deny that. Men seduce too. Women get seduced as well.
Bhumika does both. She is her story.
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