Radhika Apte turned in one of her finest performances in last year’s Monica, O My Darling. Playing a character at once distracted and hyper-aware, Apte — an effortlessly comic actor often mistaken for a serious one — was wholly brilliant. It was an improvised role; those crazy pauses and unmoderated hand gestures bear out this fact. During the press rounds, Apte suggested she’d happily return for a spin-off. The possibility of a full-fledged Radhika Apte comedy hung tantalisingly in the air.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Undercover is not that film. Anushree Mehta’s debut feature has a promising premise; a housewife, formerly trained as a secret agent, is called to hop back into the fray. Apte is smartly and suitably cast in the lead role. Yet, handed a limited set of gags and not much room to improve them, she stumbles and fails. I laughed when her character, Durga, brandished a belal (rolling-pin) as a nunchuck. Soon, though, the film ran out of tricks.
Mrs. Undercover (Hindi)
Like Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan, Durga was once an orphan with nowhere to go. She was trained by the country’s special forces and planted in Kolkata as a sleeper agent. For ten years, there was no contact, and somewhere down the line, her handler died. Durga moved on. Her cover identity — that of an ordinary Kolkata housewife — became her real one, caring for her son, in-laws, and brusque husband, with whom she shares dwindling intimacy.
We can deduce from the start that Durga has lost touch with her old life (she slips watering the garden pots). However, a spree of murders prompts Special Forces chief Rangeela (Rajesh Sharma, hysterical in these roles) to track her down. He wants her to catch ‘The Common Man’ — bizarrely, not the RK Laxman mascot, but a psychotic killer of women. Durga is unswayed; she has her son’s unit tests to attend to.
Thirty minutes into the story, Mrs. Undercover gets loaded with spy cliches: the forgotten ex-operative now domesticated beyond belief, the slippery double agent who reveals himself early on, a dopey repressed villain who says stuff like, “I have a condition.” Occasionally, there are flashes of smart writing. The words ‘trip’ and ‘package’ are nicely deployed in a comic scene. Funny, too, are Rangeela’s multiple getups, and his solution of poking holes into a newspaper to keep watch during a stake-out.
Radhika Apte in ‘Mrs. Undercover’
Sumeet Vyas is campy and compelling in what is, in essence, a Gulshan Deviah role. Radhika is much better conveying Durga’s ordinariness than her proficiency as a spy. Her relationship with her husband is clumsily handled. Initially, Durga appears to have internalised his put-downs and barbs, even attempting to look past his infidelity to ‘fix’ her marriage. Her turnaround isn’t gradual, like Alia Bhatt’s in Darlings. Instead, all it takes is a few speeches and a beatdown with goons for Durga to change... becoming Ma Durga incarnate.
The metaphor isn’t new. Kahaani, another Durga-fixated film with feminist themes, is probably to blame. It’s become a dead-end genre: the Hindi investigative film set in Kolkata (ZEE5 also has Bob Biswas and Lost). The city is portrayed in blandly functional terms in Mrs. Undercover: Kumartuli, Victoria Memorial, the works. Two songs — Shaani Rani and Durga Mahakali — have aggressive Hindi lyrics playing out over markedly Bengali settings. It’s a lot of dissonance for a day. As viewers, we probably are better off with Bachchan’s Ekla Cholo Re.
Mrs. Undercover is currently streaming on ZEE5
