Welcome to the hormonal revolution

In one of the most path-breaking scenes in this nine-episode entertainer, the protagonist  Shobita Dhulipala and her screen-husband Jim Sarbh make love with their hands legs and  tongue all over the screen. This lack  of inhibition on the wen is most refreshing. Bring it on.

Say hello to this bracing antidote  to repression. Every  major character  in Made In Heaven is  waiting to  break free from one form of repression or another. Shobita’s  character Tara comes  from  a humble  middleclass  background, has married into money and now ‘Money’ is cheating on her with her best friend.You can’t have your diamonds without sleepless nights.

Sleepless nights, reminds me  of Arjun Mathur’s character Karan Mehra who is a closeted  homosexual  yearning to come  out, grappling with emotional and financial  problems. Together these  two very fine actors, Arjun and Shobhita, plot and plan  through a string of affluent weddings,  lavish  on  both food  and feud, fuelled  by desire and  desperation  and  a longing to find a  more  relevant core  in their  plush  lifestyle than what is affordable  to  the  senses.

Some   of  these  characters are wretchedly  unhappy. I  mean,  how  successful  can a marriage  be when the wife-to-be sleeps  with a Bollywood superstar(wishful casting of Pulkit Samrat) who is invited to perform  at  her wedding?  Or a  tycoon’s sole male heir(the  underused Pavail Gulati from  the  mini-series  Yudh) who  tells his parents that his  wife is no goldigger and that the  child she aborted in  the past was his, when it was  not?

Lies seem  to  fuel the  passions  of  these inflamed characters. A simmer  discontent  underlines  the  well laid-out drama, like  a still blue pool that whirls and swirls  underneath. Accordingly  the truthful  moments shine brightly  in  the series. There is this epiphanous  encounter between our hero Karan and his snoopy landlord’s  zany daughter (Yashaswini Dayama— wish there was more of her in the series) when he catches her smoking and reprimands  her, and she tells him he shouldn’t stay  out all  night.They both know each other’s guilty secrets and are comfortable in their knowledge.

The  writing (Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar, Niranjan Iyenger, Alankrita Shrivastava,  Vivek Anchalia) is fluent and feisty. The dialogues  hit the right notes without  putting too  fine  a point  on it. While the  surfaces  glisten with gloss, this is  not a series that wallows in  superficial  glamour. Not by half. Issues on societal  hypocrisy (Arjun runs  into  a lover all set  to marry  an unsuspecting bride who when  confronted  hits back with, ‘Will YOU marry me?’ )  run through the series  creating a tingling spine  of  revelations on topics that  cinema  refrains  from exploring.

The performances  range from outstanding  to  satisfactory, and the quality doesn’t depend  on  the  length  of  the character’s role. Shivani Raghuvanshi has less playing time than the other protagonists. But she nails it as a small-towner Jazz (real name Jaspreet) revelling  in  the  life of  the rich and  the privileged. Though a brunt of  sniggers, it is Jazz who often comes  up with solutions in deadlocked weddings.

For all its optical affluence and love for the lush, Made In Heaven tells us there is more to the working class than meets the eye.