Maa Behen

“Daayan”. “Chudail”. “Vaishya”. “Chhichhori”. “Massage queen”. “Husband killer”. “Rekha ka dekha”. In Maa Behen, the list of slanders that Rekha (Madhur Dixit Nene) is subjected to is endless. There are multiple urban legends of her exploits in the locality—true or not is up for debate—but director Suresh Triveni and writer Pooja Tolani make one thing clear from the onset: Rekha is a single parent who has raised two daughters, Jaya (Triptii Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga), on her own. That the daughters too believe some of these rumours around their mother is a source of laughs, not tension, in the film. Perhaps there’s no more complex relationship than mother-daughter. Surprisingly, it’s an unexplored dynamic in mainstream Hindi cinema, and Maa Behen dives into it with a distinct, quirky approach. There’s distrust, finger-pointing, screaming contests and constant reprimanding from both sides.

Every actor of consequence harbours a desire to inhabit roles that foreground performance—particularly those that test their flair for comedy, that most elusive of arts requiring instinct, rhythm, and razor-sharp timing. While legends such as Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, alongside actors of formidable gravitas like Dilip Kumar and Irrfan Khan, have traversed the delicate line between the tragic and the comic with enviable ease, many have faltered in a genre that demands spontaneity and wit in equal measure. It is with such expectations that one approaches Maa Behen, a Netflix offering headlined by Madhuri Dixit. Directed by Suresh Triveni—who made a promising debut with the gently humorous Tumhari Sulu before veering into more sombre territory—the film attempts to mine a vein of humour that Hindi cinema seldom exploits with conviction: black comedy.

If you grew up in a colony in a village or small town, chances are there was that one household you were asked to stay away from. You aren’t allowed to play with the children over there. The reason is a woman – usually very beautiful – who is believed to be a femme fatale. It’s all fully based on hearsay, and we get colourful stories of the woman’s tantalizing ways, whereas the householder is blissfully unaware. In Suresh Triveni’s Netflix Original film Maa Behen, we get a woman of this kind. Attractive, coquettish, and the object of every man’s fantasy (and every woman’s disdain), Rekha (Madhuri Dixit) is a mom to two firebrand girls, Jaya (Triptii Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga). Together, they headline a wild and supremely entertaining feminist rib-tickler that would force you to exclaim, “Why is this not a series?”

By taking India’s most exhausted street insult and turning it into a literal roll call — Maa (Madhuri Dixit) and Behen (Triptii Dimri and Dharna Durga) — the prolific Suresh Triveni essentially asks this week: What if the women routinely weaponised in local cuss words actually team up to hide a dead body or the rot of patriarchal entitlement. It shares DNA with Darlings and Haseen Dillruba, pulp-crime comedies headlined by mainstream actors in which ordinary women subvert expectations by outsmarting society, only to reveal that the crime we panicked over is more visceral than it seems. Set in a middle-class housing society, cleverly called Adarsh Colony, Maa Behen gradually becomes a physical representation of societal surveillance. The neighbour network, led by Charitra Kumar Gupta (Ravi Kishan), is designed to show how a judgmental community assassinates the character of a single woman, a single mother.

‘Maa’, ‘Behen’ — two words that spawn a litany of abuses. When an acclaimed director, Suresh Triveni, chooses to name the film so, rest assured it is not any cursory nomenclature. It comes loaded with a host of meanings and layers and, in its own way, flips more than one stereotype. Why, the main characters too derive their names from a popular detergent advertisement. What’s in a name? A lot. But before we move to what the Netflix movie entails at deeper levels, let it be said that this dark comedy thrives on fun and subversive elements. The women here — who else but a mother, Rekha (Madhuri Dixit), and her two daughters, Jaya (Tripti Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga), are unabashedly unapologetic. In the very first scene, we see Jaya sitting in an IVF centre minus her spouse. Soon after, she gets a call from her mother who has apparently killed her neighbour Charitra Gupta (Ravi Kishan) in her own house. As she and her sister Sushma descend upon the mother’s house, drama unfolds almost like the theatre of the absurd.

सभ्य लोगों की कॉलोनी में रहने वाली अकेली विधवा रेखा जी को कॉलोनी की औरतें ‘चालू’ समझती हैं और मर्द प्यासी नज़रों से देखते हैं। खासकर पड़ोसी गुप्ता जी के परिवार की नज़र में तो वह ‘डायन’ हैं। गुप्ता जी के घर में शादी है और एक रात वह रेखा जी के घर में आकर ‘मर’ गए हैं। अब रेखा और उनकी बेटियों जया व सुषमा को यह ‘लाश’ ठिकाने लगानी हैं। लेकिन कभी आ जाती हैं गुप्ताइन जी, कभी आ जाते हैं गुप्ता जी के साले दारोगा जी तो कभी रेखा के दामाद जी। अब भयंकर वाला कांड हुआ है और उसे छुपाना भी है तो खलबली तो मचेगी ही। लेकिन इस खलबली के पीछे का सच क्या है? क्या गुप्ता जी सचमुच ‘मरे’ हैं? गुप्ता जी वहां आए ही क्यों थे? क्या रेखा जी सचमुच ‘डायन’ हैं? क्या रेखा, जया और सुषमा अपने परिवार पर लगे दागों को धोकर सफेदी की चमकार वापस ला पाएंगी?

A middle-aged widow (Madhuri Dixit) finds herself in a ‘killer’ soup. She is stuck with the dead body of a next-door neighbour (Ravi Kishan) in her living room. It’s the middle of the night. The panic-stricken woman calls up both her Patna-based daughters — the older one (Triptii Dimri) who slaves away at her husband’s home, and the younger one (Dharna Durga) who’s desperate to go viral as an influencer. The two warring sisters arrive at their mother’s the next morning and wonder how to solve the crisis. When they ask her what happened, she narrates an over-elaborate adventure of self-defense. It sounds like a farfetched lie; they do not believe her. But they go about dealing with the body anyway. What follows is a quirky small-town dramedy that features the squabbling and spirited ladies, the man’s suspicious family, a kidnapping case, a lovelorn cop, an entitled husband, a bag of cash, an upcoming wedding, and a cryptic ransom call.