Saali Mohabbat

A small-town woman, Kavita (Radhika Apte), feels out of place at a South Delhi party. It’s a rainy day; she looks at a tree outside the window. Her husband’s friends are snooty and patronising. He has a roving eye. She catches him making out with one of the guests. She then gathers the high-society gang around her and starts to narrate a story in an earthy accent that makes them smirk. But the smirks don’t last long. Her “fiction” revolves around a housewife named Smita (Apte), a previous version of herself that they don’t know about. It goes thus. When Smita’s provocative cousin Shalini (Sauraseni Maitra) visits, her loan-riddled husband Pankaj (Anshumaan Pushkar) falls for the younger woman and the two start a torrid affair in the house behind Smita’s back. That’s not all, Shalini two-times Pankaj with a crooked cop named Ratan (Divyenndu); she’s stringing along two horndogs because why not. Needless to say, a heartbroken Smita is not pleased. And when a seemingly docile homemaker trapped in a setting full of predators and cheaters is not pleased, darkness is always around the corner.

Love, lust and betrayal were the key elements of Chutney, the short film Tisca Chopra had produced back in 2016. Watching Saali Mohabbat reminded me strongly of that short– watch it if you haven’t– written and directed by Jyoti Kapur Das, which had begged to be a full-length feature narrative in the way it peeled back the dark layers that hide behind a seemingly normal household in Ghaziabad. The arrival of a perky young thing creating ripples in a marriage is not a new idea, but Chutney refreshed it with an interesting slate of actors: Tisca herself in the lead as the toothy plain-faced woman with a sharp brain, accompanied by Adil Hussain and Rasika Dugal.