Arrya is Hindi adaptation of the Dutch series Ponza 2010. The crime saga of a family. It is gripping enough for binge-watching.
The later episodes do leave with the ‘what next feeling’ for you to continue. There is drama, and there are multiple characters with interconnected plots. Sometimes it becomes too much to follow and keep track of the shifting answer to the question; who done it? And why? But the end is a mystical revelation that leaves you with an OH! Feeling punctuated with a bit of disappointment.
I am a Sushmita Sen admirer and have loved her in various Bollywood avatar in movies like Biwi No.1, Filhaal, Aankhen, Main Hoon Na. For me, Arrya on Disney+ Hostar’s was a much-awaited web series. I
Sushmita Sen ( as Aarya) very gently transforms from a mother and a loving wife to the unwilling drug lord. He must do things dictated by others to save her family. There is enough to keep you occupied. Array impulsive reactions and working with limited information and hardly someone to trust around is the impressive part of the series.
Sushmita does well as the main character Arrya, who has taken back seat and her husband has taken over the business in partnership with a mutual friend Jawahar (Namit Das)
and her brother Sangram (Ankur Bhatia). Soon, with her husband’s (Chandrachud Singh) murder, Aarya has to take the central stage to protect her family and her three children.
The family is in a Pharma business that uses Poppy extracts. It is a façade, and the real business is in drugs and derivatives of the poppy flower. Poppy cultivation which is central to the whole series in India, happens in MP, UP, HP and Rajasthan. In Arrya, other for the drug trucks to cross on to Pakistan and few shots of forts in Rajasthan, the series remains location-agnostic- even though it is set in Rajasthan.
The police is after Aarya to get the pen-drive her husband was leveraging and had promised to deliver if the family could get away after cutting ties with the business. She can’t go to police because3 in her business there are things you don’t want others to know.
Vikas Kumar, i.e. ACP Khan on the trail of Aarya is superbly underplayed along with his own personal side of the story.
A dialogue that is echoed by Arrya and ACP Khan is wholly woven in every act in the series. ‘It is not always a choice between good and bad. Sometimes the choice is between a bigger evil and a smaller one. One chooses the smaller evil’.
Go watch Arya one episode at a time and maybe binge-watch from episode 4 when it picks pace.
The three children have pivotal roles. Each one of them performs well; Daughter Aru (Virti Vaghani), son Veer (Viren Vazirani), and younger son superbly played by eight-year-old Adi (Pratyaksh Panwar). Adi is so natural that you end up admiring his talent. And before I end- if you watch the series- watch out for Maya Sarao (playing Jawahar’s wife, Maya), she was fabulous in her act of love-friendship and desperation.
In Aarya, every character is allowed to build up, and no one suffers from lack of association or presence. And the best part even though it has crime-mafia-drugs-police it is a series you could watch with the family ignoring one scene. There is hardly any gaalies.
Thrillers and crime mysteries is a play between the director and the audience. There are cues and indications which leads to repeated shifting of frames. This is one time that you get to know the suspect when the director slowly and peacefully serves it to you in episode 8 or 9. This is what I liked a lot about Aarya.
I liked the way, Bhagwat Gita is slowly introduced as a fusion song and used at the end to wrap up season 1 ( I would love to see season -II). It is a tough act- but the director needed this improvisation to justify the actions of the main characters.
Aarya Cast: Sushmita Sen, Chandrachur Singh, Sikander Kher. Directors: Ram Madhvani, Sandeep Modi and Vinod Rawat
BLOG/51/2020
