What hits you hard in JioHotstar’s Ziddi Ishq is not just the sheer trashiness of the presentation, its defiant pulpiness with characters behaving as if they snorted something strong, but the sheer volume of desecrated talent.
A Bengali actor of proven integrity like Parambrata Chattopadhyay is here reduced to a ghost of a presence, literally, since he Shekharda, an activist who is bumped off and who is the object of a young woman’s unhealthy obsession. He visits her regularly even after death. This is not a joke.
The talented Aditi Sudhir Pohankar, who was so powerful in She and the gawd-awful Aashram, is here reduced to an annoying bundle of nerves. Her Mehul Bose is a girl on a mission: to track down the killers of her idol. But the manner in which she goes about her task is utterly preposterous, unconvincing, and offputting.
Not her fault really. Writer-director Raj Chakraborty places very talented actors in a plot that reeks of rancid attention-grabbing tactics. In its defence, the series aspires to nothing more than cheap thrills. The mood is corny and over-stretched from the word go. The actors are pushed from one hyper-ventilating interlude to another, until the series feels like a boulder rather than a binge.
It is sad to see talented actors being so grossly misused to generate an exacerbated mood of eventfulness. Priyanshu Painyuli, once so promising in Bhavesh Joshi, is here reduced to playing a prop to the heroine. He accompanies her everywhere and contributes almost nothing to the narration’s forward thrust. Worse still is the fate of Riddhi Sen, the talented Bengali actor who once won the National Award for Best Actor, here plays the heroine’s wayward sibling, the kind of role that out-of-work actors do when they need to run their kitchen.
All roads in Raj Chakraborty’s story-yelling (and I do mean yelling) lead to Aditi Pohankar, who plays the part of part-sleuth and part-rebel with a dedication unmatched by the writing. Her confrontational sequences with the villain Siddharth (Sumeet Vyas) could have been the highlight of the show. If only the writing respected the characters’ space.
The two characters’ pitched battle at the climax has the girl being hurled around and tossed into shattered glass tables. This is not a battle of equals. It is simply exploitative and cringy.
“Listen, this is all too dramatic,” says Sumeet Vyas.
The only true words spoken in a series that is over-blown and theatrical.
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