She Season 2 Review: Continues to undermine its own revelatory potential

In a scene from the second season of Netflix’s SHE, Bhumika is asked by her peers (prostitutes who work on the same stretch of Mumbai) to become their spiritual godmother and free them from their controlling, oppressive pimps. “Khud ka takat hai toh karo jo karne ka hai. Main kaun hai?” Bhumi asks rhetorically before quitting the nth mission that is about to be dumped onto her shoulders. It’s an oddly powerful scene that underlines what has always been fascinating and yet frustrating about this series. Every time there is a sense of coherence in what the show actually wants to do, it sacrifices cogency for the thrills of its exotic underbelly. SHE’s second season casts its net wider, and is ambitious but like the first, is confused about the many threads Bhumika holds onto simultaneously. Which ones to pull and which ones to cut free.

The second season resumes where the first – a sweaty heap of raunchy sexual allegory – ended. When a series, just about any series climaxes with a literal ‘climax’ you kind of know where the show’s priorities lie. On paper SHE is about a policewoman turned undercover prostitute who must grease her wheels with the pavement of Mumbai’s darkest corners. But beneath this layer of brief and often underwhelming details, there is the arc of Bhumika’s sexual awakening, the storyline that actually sounds novel, but is criminally underserved by a script that simply doesn’t light up the way the premise promises. Of course this is not to say that sex and sleaze should be dripping down the coattails here, but a more prudent attempt at telling this story of rebellion and revelation could have been made. Instead we get a boring, often lethargic procedural that is simply too cringe at times to care for.

Aditi Pohankar resumes her role as the stiff, unanimated Bhumika, who lives two starkly different lives with pretty much the same expressionless face. It’s a unique approach to acting and it is hard to say if Bhumika’s stiffness works because of who she is or because of how forgetful some of the supporting actors are. Chief among them would the policemen behind the operation, a group of professionals who simply cannot convey tension or concern and mouth dialogues with the insincerity of props that have only just learned to speak. Some of the surveillance sequences are laughably simplistic and do not attain the authenticity of say a Family Man or Hotstar’s Special Ops. It’s all very operatic, and frankly in the way of a more interesting aspect of the narrative. The second season introduces in full, Nayak, played by Kishore (who also played a terrifically steely commando in Family Man). Nayak is the mythical drug lord who types away at computers with the ferocity of an engineer writing his last code for the company he hates. It’s a role, considering the myth that is built around the character, that sidesteps Kishore as he awkwardly tries to embody both brutality and a bit of masculine charm.

SHE is stunningly effective in places, especially when it wants to dive into the world of prostitution and the characters that populate its uncertain world. A sequence where a eunuch kidnaps Bhumika, illustrates the extremities of a cut-throat world where gender, sexuality and depravity collide in the most complex of ways. And yet, every time the show widens its eyes to the tunnels that run underneath our assumption of reality, it turns around to focus on an investigation that neither holds intrigue, nor soul. At one point Bhumika, decides to deal with a panic attack by sleeping with a customer who didn’t want to solicit her in the first place. It’s a neat little knot packed into the cumbersome nature of the story. What it says about sex, mental health and Bhumika’s coming—of-age is all bypassed for the rudimentary thrills of watching cops babble incoherent plans about catching Nayak. At one point the man leading the investigation suggest “why don’t we just finish him”. The buffoonery undercuts everything the show might have going for it.

Created by Imtiaz Ali, SHE has come back for a longer, and ultimately tiring second season that though it has its twists and turns, cannot amount to anything other that partly salacious, partly seductive, and partly really bad. There are hardly any places to start handing compliments out to, for none of the performances – except maybe the prostitute, the pimp and the eunuch – stand out. And that probably says something in itself. SHE need not have been as depraved and as erotic to helm a promising premise, but it becomes so for the sake of visual mileage. It’s probably why it has an audience. Not for the half that is part crime, nor for the story that is quite possibly a wicked take on a sexual graduation, but simply for the explicitness. It’s not what you want to remember, or forget shows for.

Watch the trailer here:

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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