Four More Shots, still going great guns

These shots are never short of breath. It is not short of a miracle that after two seasons and now into the third, Amazon Prime’s  _Four More Shots, Please_ continues to sparkle with the throwaway chutzpah, wit and sexiness that it oozed when the show was first streamed in 2019.

The four ladies at the forefront of the foamy funfest continue to display their catty mojo with much lip-smacking relish. But the real hero of the show is the writing. I have never so many sassy intelligent lines being thrown into one show in such an uninterrupted flow. Dammit, these women are smart, but not half as smart as their lines make them sound. A standing ovation for the writers Devika Bhagat and Ishita Moitra.

The writing is so good that the actors need to be just adequate to set the ball rolling. Kirti Kulhari , Sayani Gupta, Bani J and Maanvi Gagroo are more adequate, much more. They individually and collectively project a  fiesta of feminine and feminist viewpoints which come together at some point in a  surge of dramatic discourse.

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Gagroo has the best part as Siddhi a privileged brat who flaunts her money and is really very badly behaved in the way children of the rich are alleged to be. Her brattiness almost gets her date-raped in an episode that is savage, funny and savagely funny. At her birthday celebration in an Italian villa (budgets, we can see, are not always restricted) she gives a breakfast speech that makes all her friends and family cringe. That  Siddhi’s newly widowed mother (Simone Singh) has a new love interest (Sushant Singh) has aggravated Siddhi’s tantrums.

This woman is not afraid to look ridiculously self-serving on screen. Neither are her friends. Their problems may seem trivial to the girl whose electricity bill has not been paid, or the guy who has just lost his job because he wouldn’t clean his boss’ toilet. But the world is not only about the people we know, or even relate to.

Each character in Four More Shots, Please has a life. It may not interest us. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to judge them.

Interestingly, although the screenwriting favours the women the male characters have well-etched sharply-drawn characters. Damini (Sayani Gupta) plays ping pong with two men, the affable bartender who has been around since Season One played by Prateik Babbar, and a young enterprising Maharashtrian politician played by the earnest Rohan Mehra.

Damini’s ping pong goes on for too long. Some people take time to make up their minds.

Kirti Kulhari’s Anjana’s domestic drama with her ex-husband (a delightfully guileless Neil  Bhoopalam)  is far more interesting than her office romance with a poker-faced Sameer Kocchar. There is a wickedly humorous breakfast scene with Anjana, her ex-husband their 6-year daughter, when the ex-husband’s wife (Amrita Puri) barges in.

I am completely confused with Umang (Bani)’s sexuality. She loves women and gets ostracized by her conservative Sikh father for it. She loves a single mother (Shilpa Shukla) but also has the hots for Sean (Jim Sarbh). Is Umang bisexual or simply try-sexual?

The chaos of minds with too little serious problems and too many recreational hours is captured in wonderfully engaging episodes. Stretching into ten episodes, there is scarcely a dull moment in the dishy design. This is a very good-looking serial with good-looking characters who are largely insulated from the reality of the world outside. But in their cocooned existence is not claustrophobic. Their ability to laugh at themselves and to see their own blemishes without blinking is what makes them so rich in elitist emotions.

After the third season of Four More Shots, I am ready for one more.

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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