Shabana Azmi is the pivot around which Dabba Cartel, a female-driven Netflix crime drama series, swivels. She is in her element. That is half the battle won. Winning the remaining half takes a bit of doing. Happily, it isn’t entirely beyond the team behind and before the camera.
Azmi pulls her weight without missing a beat. She is ably supported by a wonderful ensemble cast that includes Jyotika, Nimisha Sajayan, Sai Tamhankar, Lillete Dubey, Shalini Pandey and Anjali Anand. The writing, too, contributes more than its mite to the show by putting a vigorous fresh spin on the genre.
Yet, there is no escaping the feeling that the seven-episode Excel Entertainment-produced series, created by Shibani Akhtar, Gaurav Kapur, Vishnu Menon and Akanksha Seda, could have been a little tighter at the seams and a bit lighter at the edges. It falls just a touch short of being an unqualified success.
But that does no permanent damage to the overall prospects of the series. Dabba Cartel touches many a high. It is a bit like a dabba that is never fully laid out on the table. Barring the secret product that the women add to it the audience isn’t made privy to its contents.
We do see two of the younger women in the gang shopping for provisions or cooking the meals meant for distribution. But what it is that they rustle up is never revealed. The show is not about what is in the dabba but about what is not meant to be. Therein lies the rub.
There are moments in Dabba Cartel that tangentially might recall parts of Ocean’s 8 and Widows (neither of which it imitates, given its purely indigenous moorings), but its twists and turns do not always land with the expected force.
Dabba Cartel works less as a twisted thriller leavened with comic touches than as a study of characters who are contrasted within and across classes and genders. At one end of the spectrum is a corporate honcho’s wife struggling to pull her boutique out of the red, at the other is her clear-headed kaamwali bai (maidservant) who is a key cog in the dabba delivery wheel.
The two women, a few years apart in age, clash frequently, bringing to a head the piquant contradictions that exist within a group yoked together by a combination of economic and emotional factors.
Azmi plays Sheila, a Gujarati mother-in-law with a double life that she has concealed from the of the world (barring a longtime confidante played by Lillete Dubey) for three decades. She delivers her lines with clinical precision (with an accent that points to her cultural and linguistic background) and with a completely straight face.
The reticent lady leads a ragtag all-women quintet that peddles more than just meals in lunchboxes. She lives in a cooperative residential complex in Thane inhabited by honchos and employees of VivaLife Pharmaceuticals.
The multinational company, like the unflappable matron at the heart of the story, nurtures dark secrets that, if they are unravelled, could land its boss, Shankar Dasgupta (Jisshu Sengupta), and his cohorts in big trouble.
The residents of the group housing society include Sheila’s pregnant Maharashtrian daughter-in-law Raji (Shalini Pandey), who runs a tiffin delivery business to supplement the family income. Her doting husband Hari Jagtap (Bhupendra Jadawat) sucks up to his boss in the hope of being transferred to the company’s Germany office. All of Hari’s plans revolve around that eventuality.
Besides Sheila (Azmi) and her docile daughter-in-law, the gang is made up of Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), a single mother who works as a housemaid; her employer Varuna Panniker (Jyotika), Shankar’s unhappy wife who runs a floundering business in need of an urgent infusion of cash; and a sprightly property broker Shahida (Anjali Anand).
Shahida, whose biggest secret hinges on a covert friendship she forges with a client, police constable Preeti Jadhav (Sai Tamhankar), who has been deployed to assist a seasoned and honest to fault drug inspector Ajit Pathak (Gajraj Rao).
Each of the women we see in Dabba Cartel is on a personal quest. Each has her secrets, dreams and needs (these, sometimes, tip over into greed). Sheila has a past she cannot live down, Raji chases a dream to relocate to Germany with her husband, Mala has the future of a young daughter to worry about and Varuna has a business that is in danger of going belly up.
Preeti, on her part, has a point to prove to her male bosses in the police force who believe that she does not have it in her to handle the pressure of important cases and Shahida has plans that she is cannot afford to bring out into the open.
Men aren’t absent from the scene but it is the women on whom the writers Vishnu Menon and Bhavna Kher and director Hitesh Bhatia train the spotlight. These are women whose instincts for survival drive them into acts that border on the dangerous and desperate.
They are drawn into a life of crime – at least one of them knows exactly what they are getting into, while another agrees to play along with great reluctance. Once in, the female cartel goes the whole hog despite the reservations and confusions that assail a few of them. Drama stems from the conflicts and subterfuges that ensue.
The unrelenting Ajit Pathak and the hardworking Preeti Jadhav investigate a drug scandal that is brought to the fore by a car crash in faraway Amritsar, where a young woman under the influence of an over-the-counter tablet manufactured by VivaLife tragically loses her life.
While the women forge links with a drug peddler Amol Chavan (Sandesh Kulkarni) and the dismissed R&D head of VivaLife, Bhowmick Bose (Santanu Ghatak), with the intention of furthering their enterprise, the two investigators bumble their way into discoveries that threaten to blow the lid off their and VivaLife’s clandestine activities.
Azmi’s performance, which recalls the actor’s memorable Godmother turn from 25 years ago, serves as the principal ingredient in Dabba Cartel. The actors around her give a solid account of themselves, matching their formidable co-star step for step.
Jyotika as the aggrieved pharma industry pro-turned-housewife is terrific. Anjali Anand in the role of the feisty broker who is inadvertently drawn into a deal that spells danger and Shalini Pandey as the focussed young mother-to-be deliver impressive turns.
Nimisha Sajayan and Sai Tamhankar make the strongest impressions as two women who face the brunt of class and gender prejudice at the workplace.
The script ensures that the male actors, especially Gajraj Rao and Jisshu Sengupta, have all the elbow room that they need. They measure up all the way.
Bhupendra Jadawat as a feckless pharma industry executive ready to bend over backwards for some brownie points, Santanu Ghatak as a man who receives the rough end of the stick once he has served his purpose in the larger scheme of things and Sandesh Kulkarni as a ruthless criminal who hides sharp fangs behind a pleasant facade find their spaces in a tale that meanders with a purpose.
Although the end of Dabba Cartel isn’t open-ended – the emergence of new criminal mastermind brings one chapter to a close and opens another – a couple of quick final scenes point to the possibility of an extension.
Uneven but always engrossing, Dabba Cartel has the potential for a longer run. It would be interesting to watch where the cartel goes from here and what shape their dabbas take.
