Sai Tamhankar is one of Indian cinema’s most velveteen femme fatales, effortlessly conveying smoky mystery and misdirection. What might Bol Bol Rani have been like without her? The question is rhetorical.
In Sid Vinsurkar’s Marathi movie, which is out in cinemas, Tamhankar plays a rural memsaab named Maya in Surjanpur village in Maharashtra. The writer Aabhas (Subodh Bhave) comes to Surjanpur to investigate the lore around Maya, who is under arrest for killing her husband (Chinmay Mandlekar). Three people give three different accounts of Maya, who has excited the imagination without ever once leaving her house.
The first story, and the most chilling, is also the best. Maya is bound in more ways than one to her husband. The dynamic crackles with tension and ambivalence.
All the strangeness about Maya is present in this episode. Tamhankar is mesmerising as the spouse who goes from a pained smile to a crafty look in a split second. Sid Vinsurkar and writers Saurabh Bhave and Himanshu Nimbhorkar make good use of silence here, ratcheting up ample suspense with sound effects and meaningful camera angles.
In the progressively weaker second and third chapters, Maya is remembered as a druggie with a supplier (Sambhaji Sasane) and a dutiful wife with a devoted lover (also Sasane). Apart from Chinmay Mandelkar as the repeatedly slain spouse, common elements are strewn across the Rashomon-inspired plot, which is based on Bhalchandra Sule’s play Anki Ek Narayan Nikam.
Having commenced with a bang, Bol Bol Rani goes out with a series of whimpers, each as progressively quiet as the background music is loud.
The 125-minute film feels overstretched, with some of its smarter choices – the confined settings, the absence of facile moralising – not paying off as they could have. The ending is a copout that doesn’t complete the thought with which the movie began. At least the third episode has some well-timed comedy by Mandlekar as a stereotypical poetry-spouting husband.
Apart from staring at an evidence board and meeting the three Maya yarn-spinners, Subodh Bhave has little to do. Sambhaji Sasane has more on his plate as the third man in each of the stories. This is a Sai Tamhankar show all the way, and she delivers superbly.
