When Chhal Kapat Deceives… It’s Only Itself

Chhal Kapat: The Deception — Shriya Pilgaonkar Can’t Lift This Tragedy Of Errors

Pilgaonkar seems stuck in a production that’ll neither let itself be rescued nor let the competent actress escape its wreckage, writes Manik Sharma.

“KALYUG HAI YE , jo aasani se dikh jaaye aksar jhooth hota hai ”, a senior policewoman declares to her clueless subordinate, in a scene from Zee5’s Chhal Kapat: The Deception . It’s a scene that perfectly encapsulates the tonal desperation of a show that would rather hurl its pathos at you than eloquently caress it into the space between your breaths. There is nothing subtle about this show that starts like all held-in-a-building murder mysteries and then spirals into a wreckage of half-baked ideas and execution begging to be held together by the single-roll duct tape of Shriya Pilgaonkar . It’s a disaster that the dependable actress can neither save nor, for the sake of her own self, escape.

An influencer dies under suspicious circumstances at the destination wedding of her friend. The ensuing investigation purports twists, threatens facades and unravels hidden secrets. On paper, it’s familiar but reliable territory. That reliability, though, is marred by clumsiness akin to disinterest in the very fundamentals of storytelling. The show’s first episode feels like a whirlwind of spliced shots that interchange positioning with time and space, to appear a Nolan-esque cataclysm of structure sans any sense. At this fairly plush wedding of bitter, insolent characters, there are crossed wires of communication, stifled friendships, the stench of affairs, lust and betrayal. It’s a promising buffet of sleaze and scandal, but Chhal Kapat is so off the mark, it practically hits everything in the mandap except the point.

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It’s hard to write about a show that’s barely coherent or understands the brief of stitching together a narrative. Pilgaonkar plays Devika, a troubled cop who has her own demons to deal with (played through some terrible CGI flashbacks). She slaloms in, her pitch at par with the Rohit Shetty cop universe; on the cusp, as if from stepping out from a spinning car that would then be blasted open for the heck of pyrotechnics. There are bickering friends in this mire, heightened jealousies, but not an ounce of realism. A scene where a woman berates another one for failing to conceive a child before turning the metaphorical gun on herself and walking away as the victim in her stead. It’s baffling, mind-boggling. Even the camerawork looks confused about the framing of what is specifically an insult to good writing and effective performance.

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Directed by Ajay Bhuyan, this seven-episode series offers more curiosity in terms of its ineptitude than whatever inkling of a story it is trying to sell. For one, the episodes are roughly 18-20 minutes long. Some of them are at the fitting length of 15 minutes. Almost as if a feature-length film was cut into pieces, because neither the sum of its parts nor the pie as a whole adds up to anything in particular. That length of time almost feels like surrender in the face of diminishing attention spans. Storytelling ought to instil confidence in the art of anchoring focus, but true to its name, Chhal Kapat is unwilling to even attempt a rebuttal. It’s happy to flash on screen and retreat into anonymity. None of the episodes feel linear, or focused enough to weld its key themes — social media anxiety, creator jealousy, etc. It’s like an acid trip, punctuated by pauses of lethargy and ineptitude.

Pilgaonkar tries pulling the show sideways, to shake into it the semblance of blood flow. But all she can do is poke holes into the strained nerves of naivety or render it a dizzying blob of jelly that could break away into just about any direction. The performances are horrid across the board. Even the investigation feels so hackneyed that you’re better off playing Sudoku with your legs up rather than following a rowdy female cop who stares at medicine bottles like they contain the genetic samplings of an exotic species. In one scene, Devika talks to her colleagues about a minor breakthrough — the act of one person tagging another on social media — with the heavy-handedness of a super sleuth who has just solved the mystery of self-destructing brain cells. Sure, it’s about time when we induct social media as a tool for inquiry, but to speak about it in the self-serious tone of a Nobel winner who has just solved cancer, feels tonally suicidal. But then, there is precious little else in the writing to speak of both sides of the screen.

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A murder at a wedding where rich people have gathered, with undertones of social media anxiety in the creator age, is a potent premise for something intriguing and timely. For a subset of the country’s youth, it’s practically an aspirational form of living, and in this case, dying. But the satirical quality of all that razzmatazz, the suavity required to pull off elegant and exoticism, is stunningly amiss from a show that is staggering for the fact that it exists. It’s probably besides the point to even paint a picture of what happens, or how it happens, because the people to whom it happens look so defeated and uninterested themselves. Pilgaonkar, for her part, looks stuck. Consigned to an assignment where she can do nothing but deliver the cadaver from a nursery of bad ideas. It’s better to be deceived by things that are so bad that they become good. This one never will.

Watch Chhal Kapat: The Deception here

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