 "Apharan Season 2 review: Arunoday Singh returns in a kitschy drama that'll keep you hooked till the end")
“Do not mock me just because your life is fuk-fuk,” an unstoppable lady who is brought in to pose as our RAW agent hero Rudra’s wife in Serbia, screams at him at the airport.
Strangely, no passerby gives this fuk-fuk tamasha a second glance.
More than even the first season, Apharan 2 inhabits a world of weird goings-on. Shootouts happen in the middle of busy streets in foreign countries, and no one stops to ask, “Is this a shooting going on?”
Pun intended. I know. A really awful pun. But what the fuk-fuk! The fun of watching through 11 gloriously kitschy episodes of Apharan 2 is to go with the blood-dimmed tide. Just ride the waves of violence and cuss language [in both Hindi and English, subtitles not needed] as you would enjoy a specially heaving lurching and rocky rollercoaster ride which takes us from Serbia to Haridwar.
There is an unexpected payoff in the last episode when veteran actor Jeetendra [coincidentally, producer Ekta Kapoor’s father] makes a brief appearance as Rudra’s father. “Go, get my son,” the veteran orders the RAW chief Bhandari [a slick actor, Ujjawal Chopra].
Bhandari looks at Jeetendra with a haven’t-we-been-there-before puzzlement. I can understand Bhandari’s anxiety to stay in the good books of the powers-that-be: there is a third season around the corner, and no one wants to be written out of the kissy-kissy-bang-bang plot, which tilts its twirling toupee to Shashi Kapoor in the 1960s musical blockbuster Haseena Maan Jayegi and Shah Rukh Khan in Farhan Akhtar’s Don [2006].
Like the two heartthrobs earlier, Arunoday Singh, that impressively imposing actor with a granite face and a physique to match, has two avatars in Apharan 2. One of them, the imposter Rudra [who is actually the international assassin Bir Bahadur Shah, but shhhhhhh!] is planted in place of the real Rudra, with Rudra’s wife Ranjana [Nidhi Singh] in Haridwar while the real Rudra, who has lost his mind, is in Serbia, being brainwashed by a wily hitwoman named Nafisa [Sukhmani Sadana] into believing that she is his wife.
Then there is Gilauri [played with Mallika Dua vibes by Snhel Dixit Mehra], the imposter fuk-fuk wife mentioned at the start.
All this may sound enormously confounding to the average OTT viewers, though I would not bet on it: streaming dramas are opting for progressively complicated plots to keep viewers involved right till the end.
So here is my suggestion on how to enjoy the heretical hijinks of Apharan: focus on the women characters who are far more interesting than the men even in their restricted dimensionality.
Ranjana, for example, is just out of a coma. She believes she is a singer on par with Lata Mangeshkar , and then changes loyalties to Lata Mangeshkar’s sister Asha Bhosle. At one rage-filled point, she tells her [imposter] husband, “Have you forgotten I got you to sing a song for Pancham [ RD Burman ]?”
“Who the hell is Pancham, we must find him,” the fake Rudra [who looks like he has grown up on Deff Leppard) snarls under his breath.
Indeed we must. In the meantime, there is Lata Mangeshkar at the beginning of every episode singing ‘Ae Phansa’ (from the 1973 film Bobby). Whether this declaration of a trap refers to the characters, or to us the viewers, I do not know.
Just hang on in there. Because the climactic fight between the two Arunodays on the banks of the river Ganga will keep you guessing which one gets to live at the end. The survivor gets to frontline Season 3. Lucky chap.
Apharan Season 2 is streaming on Voot Select.
Rating: ***
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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