‘Ankahi Kahaniya’ Review: Netflix’s anthology offers love to tranquillity

Bollywood directors rarely fight love honestly, but the entry point is almost always the boys when they do. The audience is more oriented to the love story if it is told from a dominant point of view. The order in which the boy meets the girl remains the same.

Two of the three films in Ankahi Kahaniya break this pattern.

In Abhishek’s film, Manjari (Rinku Rajguru) first sees Nandu (Delzad Hivale), a one-screen theatre employee whom he attends. Tanu (Zoya Hussein) looks for Manav (Kunal Kapoor) in the Saket segment. Ashwiny’s short films with representations of lifeless women also seem to be developing at eye level.

Your film will open in a clothing store in Mumbai. Pradip (Abhishek Banerjee) is an immigrant who has no one to talk to. His loneliness is very prominent, although Ashuini also finds a way to express Pradip’s worries. He started talking, then got dressed and made an appointment with the mannequin in the shop.

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It’s an okay guess, and writers Piyush Gupta, Shreas Jain, and Nitesh Tiwari soon abandoned Spike Yonze’s solitary urban poetry in favour of a more formal structure. The clean visual design misses Abhishek’s smooth and flawless execution. He is a charming taciturn performer who sets the stage with the discomfort of real encounters.

Awkwardness also dominated the opening minutes of Abhishek Chaubey’s short film. In an unstable theatre, Manjari and Nandu drown their daily hard work in film dreams.

He imagined her as a raspberry-style goddess. He, in turn, presented him as the star of the 80s. Beneath this superficial romance hides a more profound love affair between cameraman Avinash Arun and old cinemas.

It seals the details of love: posters, coffee machine, samosas, still scattered on the greasy paper plate. Abhishek evokes a series of forgotten moods. He says that while Nandu and Manjari swallow the big moves on the screen, their own stories come from parallel and intermediate cinema. Life is a (rocky) beach.

Away from this working world, Saket Chaudhary’s film goes in a completely different direction.

Tanu is married to Arjun (Nihil Dvivedi), whom she believes is cheating on her. In a terrifying rage, he followed the woman on Facebook and then messaged her husband on LinkedIn. “See a therapist,” Manav (Kunal Kapoor) says upon meeting.

But he somehow convinced her by taking her to the resort where their husbands first met. They visualize every detail on all fours and steer minority reports in the opposite direction – weird, sentimental science fiction without science.

Saket struggles the most with short-lived formats. The connected structure may seem funny on paper, but it gives the show. I’m not very interested in the characters’ individual stories.

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They don’t register emotionally or contextually fascinate. The casting is too accurate: Kunal im Männerbrötchen, who talks about the start-up (the actor who runs the successful Ketto platform), is a little confused. The best predictable scenes by the sea, a brief musical pause before the jingle continues. Who said that about pictures and words?

The scenes on the screen become imaginary, romantic performances with Manjari and Nandu as heroes and heroes of their own story. Rajguru and Hivale communicate their fears, interests and hopes sensitively and skillfully through expressions and actions. The results are surprising and refreshing in what is arguably the most thoughtful and imaginative film of the three.

The latest story, directed by Saket Chaudhary (written by Chaudhary and Zeenat Lakhani), improves the setting.

It revolves around two unfaithful couples, playing Kunal Kapoor as Manav, the cheating husband’s wife in one marriage, and Zoya Hussein as Tanu, the betrayed wife of the other.

They gather at cafes, teas and beach resorts and try to follow the lead that led to his wife Natasha (Palomi Ghosh) and husband Arjun (Nihil Dvivedi) having an affair.

In their deliberation and conspiracies, they end up doubting the role they play in each other’s marriage. Verbally and visually flat, Kapoor and Hussein can only push this clichéd and distorted story to the best of their ability.

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The countless love stories are the glue with a broad sweep to this anthology. Still, the exploration of reality and imagination and the more good themes of acceptance and separation resonate, especially in Chaubey’s extraordinary contribution.