Sakhi Gokhale is the real surprise in Adkitta, who gives her most mature performance yet, cheers Mayur Sanap.
Key Points
- Writer-director Ashutosh Parandkar takes a fairly familiar modern-marriage problem and gives it an interesting emotional angle.
- Sai Tamhankar is at her usual best, who is never afraid to give her co-stars the spotlight when the scene demands it.
- Sakhi Gokhale gets a character with considerably more emotional meat than Sai, and makes full use of it.
‘Locha zala (We have got a problem).’
That’s how Kasturi, played by Sakhi Gokhale, breaks the news of her pregnancy to her partner Gautam (Siddharth Chandekar) in the opening minutes of Adkitta.
Adkitta, which is a Marathi word for a betel nut cracker, becomes a metaphor for its characters’ emotional conundrum and circumstance.
Gautam and Kasturi are career-oriented, but they fear an unplanned pregnancy could complicate their lives, especially Kasturi’s. Still, they decide to have the baby. What follows is a story about a couple living in a metro city trying to be good parents and professionals, only to find out that balance to be tough.
Help is needed, and foster care enters the picture. Then comes Mangal, played by Sai Tamhankar, a nanny who takes on the childcare and becomes part of Kasturi and Gautam’s household.
From there, the equation changes.
Kasturi begins to feel insecure as she watches her child grow increasingly attached to Mangal. What starts as a practical solution soon becomes an emotional complication.
No Easy Melodrama
Writer-Director Ashutosh Parandkar takes a fairly familiar modern-marriage problem of balancing parental responsibility with career ambition, and gives an interesting emotional angle to it. This could have been a recipe for cheesy melodrama, but much like Girls Will Be Girls, the simmering emotions between its characters are built so organically that the film almost plays out like a low-key thriller.
Adkitta reminded me a little of another Marathi film Devki, where a mishap triggers an emotional tug-of-war between the biological and adoptive mothers. There are also shades of Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s Mothers’ Instinct in the way it looks at motherhood. But Adkitta doesn’t manufacture villains or resort to melodramatic showdown. Instead, it stays interested in people.
Mangal isn’t a villain. Kasturi isn’t a bad mother. Gautam isn’t an indifferent husband. It’s interesting how the film refuses to tell you whom to blame, as they remain three individuals simply negotiating a situation.
There is also something refreshing about how contemporary Marathi cinema is moving away from the compulsory-song approach to storytelling. Here, songs often play in the background while the actual drama continues, rather than pausing the narrative.
Sakhi Gokhale’s Most Mature Performance
Sai Tamhankar, as usual, is terrific.
Her Mangal could easily have become a convenient plot device, but Sai gives her a lived-in quality. She brings experience without showing off, and there’s also something wonderful about her as an actor. She is never afraid to give her co-stars the spotlight when the scene demands it. This quality makes her scenes with the other actors especially effective.
Sakhi Gokhale is the real surprise, who gives her most mature performance yet. She gets a character with considerably more emotional meat than Sai, and makes full use of it.
One of the film’s standout moments comes when Kasturi opens up to Gautam about these insecurities. It is not played as a scene to manufacture tears. She is just trying to articulate her irrational fear that she may be failing at motherhood.
Siddharth Chandekar holds the middle ground as understanding husband and makes an impression.
The three actors work particularly well because the film doesn’t insist on making any one of them entirely right or wrong.
Where The Film Wobbles A Little
Adkitta does leave a few interesting threads underexplored.
It hints at Gautam and Kasturi’s fallout with their parents after marriage, but the fact that both sets of parents have completely cut them off feels a little hard to believe, especially for a modern couple. It is a detail that could have added more context to their choices as a couple.
There are also stretches where the film feels slightly episodic. Mangal’s subplot involving her abusive husband (Suhas Shirsat) feels like it belongs to a different chapter of the story. Sure, it brings another perspective to her character, but the track needed more flesh to fit into the larger story.
There is also a done-to-death friend character (played by Aashay Kulkarni), who serves a very little purpose beyond giving the couple someone to spell out their problems to.
Still, the emotions run high, and Director Parandkar keeps the storytelling grounded, which makes it easy to stay invested in these characters.
Adkitta doesn’t have all the answers by the end, and that’s okay. It understands that relationships can be messy. And really, the film is at its best when it simply lets that mess speak for itself.
Adkitta streams on Z5.
Adkitta Review Rediff Rating:
