The shooting of an Indian drama is a very dramatic business – the usual ingredients of a drama are all highlighted to excess. It is dangerous to take it lightly – you let your guard down, and the mainstream Bollywood film will surprise you with a plot twist so inconceivable that you will bemoan the bland boring logic of mainstream Hollywood. This is positively so in the work of Alankrita Shrivastava, who is both writer and director of Bombay Begums.

This series is a pastiche of her former work, including the controversial Lipstick Under my Burkha. But, admittedly, this is a different series from the indie drama that launched her into the spotlight. The exciting publicity surrounding Lipstick Under my Burkha makes even more sense here, because this series is as much of a firebrand as that one was. Lipstick Under my Burkha was shot quickly and on a limited budget. Though the story was not particularly original (all the characters were introduced as the parallels to the heroine of a novella), and the ending was hardly better (with the characters reading the last few pages of the same novella), the ingenuity of its realism and camerawork was pleasing. The sympathetic side to Bombay Begums is that it feels like an adaptation of Lipstick Under my Burkha for a Netflix audience. Bombay Begums follows four women – Rani (Pooja Bhatt), Fatima (Shahana Goswami), Lily (Amruta Subhash) and Ayesha (Plabita Borthakur) – whose lives interweave in a chronology of events. In Lipstick under my Burkha however, the chronology of events was dislocated: to maintain one’s interest in the plot, one had to follow not just the characters on screen but also the narratorial voice of the author of the novella. If Lipstick under my Burkha cinematography style was like a newsreel, there is an advertorial quality here. In Bombay Begums, Shrivastava never leaves the beaten track. But the themes remain the same: human impulses and the lives of professional women who face challenges at home and in the workplace. Naturally, these domestic and professional interests collide often.

Exemplifying this conflict in one of the most strikingly filmed storylines: Fatima receives a promotion over her husband. Their personal life threatens to be scorched by the tension at work. The themes of emasculation coincide with Fatima’s need for freedom; she feels constrained in this association. What culminates solicits our admiration, precisely because it doesn’t solicit any particular judgment. The series leaves you to decide the course of action for yourself. To allow these themes to present themselves is a brave task and a difficult one for any author to execute. By the end, despite Shrivastava being ideologically absent from the storylines, the storylines present themselves with conviction. It is, therefore, a realist story, and the mise-en-scene is realist as well.

The complexity of their simple surroundings is a paradox in itself. Whether it’s Rani in her palatial home, Fatima in her modern, young-couple’s apartment or Ayesha moving from rental to rental, the loneliness and isolation of their lives remains constant. The compositions and the austerity of the mise-en-scene are directed by the moral relativism of this society; all the characters live their lives according to their needs and there is no absolutism. The fluidity in their storylines becomes tangible as a result. If all the characters in a story follow the same narrative, the same path, naturally, there will be little potential for any drama between those characters. This fluidity is present in the characters themselves, who improvise their way out of the situations they find themselves in. In one scene, an indignant Lily appeals to a politician to let her run her own factory, before conceding his demands with the words, “you are my guardian,” making their sinister contract appear like a charming escapade. The camera shares her perspective so that we see him through her eyes: dirty, sleazy, smiling. The lighting isn’t dark or moody, nor is the background creepy, yet the message is clear.

On the other hand, it is an unintentionally mysterious story. This is because while the show carries the storylines admirably well, the different threads gather up a bit too neatly for the male villain, whose stories appear truncated. Naushad’s (Danish Husain) steadfast support for his wife through thick-and-thin is at times almost self-flagellating.

Other characters too, use their freedom to channel their own destruction. Consider one of the earlier scenes of the series, in which there is a gendered critique of socioeconomic differences: Chaos shatters the darkness of the streets of Bombay, we hear the roar of a BMW as Rani’s son sets off from the brothel he’s visiting and there is a sublimely subjective tracking shot through the streets of the sinister city. There is an air of deceit, confusion and corruption as the young driver hits another boy. The boy’s mother wanders out onto the road and the driver’s mother arrives at the crime scene in the same daze of confusion. The curious eroticism of the night washes away all other erotic encounters or thoughts; every detail of this exterior shot will be played out in a darker fashion in the interior boardroom politics and bedroom manipulations later in the series.

The queen of hearts, here, is undoubtedly the character of Rani. Rani is a provincial muse in search of absolutes – absolute power, absolute beauty and absolute adoration. But while she receives adoration from the rest of the world, she doesn’t get it from her step-children. In filming the descent of this Venus amongst men, Shrivastava exposes us to the many mortals in this Olympus. As the episodes unfold, we witness the metamorphoses of these gods, the lesser gods being subordinate to Rani, with Lily, the prostitute who becomes her arch-nemesis, as Hades. Both Rani and Lily are struggling to protect their children, their reputations and their freedom.

This spectacle is a splendid paradox and one of my favorite developments in the series. It seems to suggest that to live, one must love; and in order to love, one must kill one’s moral compass. This is what Rani and Fatima discover as they fall in love with men who are not their husbands. This is the harsh moral truth of this modern fable that is presented in the guise of a tragic opera. Years of improvisation have made Shrivastava one of the finest in the genre of feminist filmography. With a flair for the grand, she achieves in one shot what others might do in five. Perhaps it is this that allows her to combine multiple storylines in a 2-hour film as easily as in a 6-episode series.

Freedom for everyone is a necessity in this tale. And never has freedom been this illogical, but then, the world has never been logical. As the gulf between cinema, social media and real life closes, one sees more of their influences in one another. For example, in a meta-disciplinary moment, a strong association with the Me-Too movement allows the show to examine cases of sexual harassment, which are common from banking to Bollywood. Shrivastava forces us to consider as real something we did not consider at all: the surreal reality of cinema. The titles of the episodes evoke the feminist sensibility of the series, from Women Who Run With the Wolves to A Room of One’s Own; the writing of these episodes mirrors their namesakes.

This is not to say that the show is political. On the contrary, it only shows what is already around us; love, fear, adventure, despair, deceit, bitterness, empathy and compassion weave in and out of the same characters. Bombay Begums sees cinema as life itself. The treachery of men, the shallowness of women, the betrayal of colleagues and the kindness of strangers all come together rather beautifully. Lily is helped by Rani for strategic reasons, yet Rani finds an ally in Ayesha, her subordinate. Ayesha was a strategic hire for Rani, yet she goes against Rani’s long-term strategy in order to get justice for being sexually harassed by a superior. The characters, thus, intercept each other at different points, contradicting themselves and each other and, at times, surpassing their own expectations.

The writer is a student of history and comparative literature at LUMS