‘Vital documents’ go missing at crucial moments, the entire anti-Narcotics team is seemingly not-very-familiar with the geography of Mumbai, Fernandez issues orders that no police chief in their right minds would. That we are expected to believe this so soon after her ruthlessness has been underlined is….a miscalculation, at the very least.Īnother huge problem with She is that the police procedural bits are just plain awful, downright silly at times. She tells Fernandez, “This is not me”, a strange reversion to the delicate/sensitive woman trope. But then, soon afterwards, Bhumika is severely distressed after being party to an act of physical violence (never mind the fact that Bhumika gets beaten up more than the leading ladies of mid-century exploitation films). Here, the writers take pains to show us Bhumika’s newfound ruthlessness in the first couple of episodes. Moreover, there is a lot of very confused writing on display, just like there was in Season 1. This simple truth undercuts most of the feminist-adjacent points Imtiaz Ali and co. Meanwhile her police handler Fernandez calls her his “greatest achievement” at one point-at every step, it seems, Bhumika is still angling for the approval of the men around her. She’s able to convince even Nayak that she’s playing a double-crossing game with the police.
The big plot development in this season is that Bhumika is stronger, much more self-assured and has learned a lot about using her body to manipulate the gangsters in her world-by-night. To begin with, the show changes genres-while the first season was more of a psychological drama, Season 2 wants to be a bright-lights action thriller.
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Season 2 is also full of the same hackneyed tropes around women that Imtiaz Ali films specialize in. Sadly for Netflix and for Ali, She scarcely fares better the second time around. Directors Arif Ali and Avinash Das (who made the winsome Anaarkali of Aarah) seem to be more interested in slo-mo close focus shots of Bhumika contorting her face in the throes of passion-the kind of stuff that would be mildly subversive 6-7 years ago but comes across as gratuitious in the ongoing streaming era. However, Season 1 utterly squandered this promise because ultimately, the show reduced its own complexity in favor of salacious slow-motion shots of Bhumika enjoying the sex (gasp) that she’s having with the men she’s technically hunting, especially Nayak himself.
This was a promising set-up, with potentially discomfiting, emotionally challenging material for all actors concerned. While pretending to be a sex worker, Bhumika experiences a kind of erotic awakening, which complicates both her mission and her regular life. She is the only earning member of her family and her husband (who she is on the verge of divorcing) beats her. The twist is this Bhumika’s domestic life is abusive and dire. Bhumika begins to lead a double life, pretending to be a sex worker by night to gain access to Nayak’s inner circle-she is what newspapers love to call a ‘honey trap’. Prima facie, the show had an intriguing premise - Bhumika Pardeshi ( Aaditi Pohankar), a young Mumbai Police Constable, is recruited by the Narcotics division in their mission to nab a feared drug kingpin Nayak (Kishore).
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In 2020, Imtiaz Ali made his streaming debut with the Netflix series She, which he co-created and co-wrote with Divya Johri.
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