Haseena Parkar: Haseena stuck up & slow

Cast: Shraddha Kapoor, Siddhanth Kapoor, Ankur Bhatia, Rajesh Tailang

Rated: 5/10

This was meant to be Shraddha Kapoor’s career-altering film based on the life and difficult times of Haseena Parkar, gangster Dawood Ibrahim’s sister who chose to stay back in Mumbai when the rest of her family escaped to foreign shores in the run-up to the Mumbai serial blasts of 1993.

It’s quite obvious in the movie that Shraddha has tried her level best to render a sterling performance as Haseena, an awkwardly gaited, swollen cheeked woman who eats her words more than she speaks them out. Kohl-lined, a stereotypical Muslim woman with skin as dark as her brother Dawood Ibrahim’s deeds, Shraddha comes across as too much of a stuck-up oddity to bring in the vibes for this biopic, moulded to imperfection by director Apoorv Lakhia.

Yes, anything D-company comes with the natural voyeuristic tendencies of the viewers which Lakhia tries to exploit with high production qualities and a staccato narrative that sits on the defence lawyer’s queries to go into frequent flashbacks. But the effect does not really tell you the story in depth and seems to give a justification for the crimes committed by Dawood. He is shown as a family loving, sister’s brother who takes beatings from his father in silence but has the potential to blast “mera Bombay” with demonic blasts all the way from his white house in Dubai.

Dawood and his misdeeds are well documented in the crimelores of Mumbai Police so there is nothing new that Lakhia tells you about him. But he will argue this was not about Dawood but his sister Haseena and her apparent travails of staying back in Mumbai for her slain husband’s family. A mini don herself who is said to have taken care of the Rs 2,000 crore empire left behind by her brother, she appeared in court just once and walked free without any charges sticking.

By the end of it, all you sympathise with her plight as a mother, sister and citizen of India which defeats the purpose of any biopic based on a criminal.

It was a fine edge which Lakhia fails to tread carefully on. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 14 September, 2017