Patna Shuklla

Patna Shuklla Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Raveena Tandon, Satish Kaushik, Anushka Kaushik, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Manav Vij, Jatin Goswami, Raju Kher

Director: Vivek Budakoti, Rajendra Tiwari

What’s Good: The honesty and the simplicity with which the tale is narrated.

What’s Bad: The over-dramatization and the lost opportunity to cater to some important conversations.

Loo Break: I’m not sure about your bladder system, but you would complete this with a lot of pauses.

Watch or Not?: Read and decide for yourself; probably should for Raveena Tandon’s on-screen persona.

Language: Hindi

Available On: Disney Hotstar

Runtime: 125 Minutes

User Rating:

Women, in general, have to fight with an age-old bias to date. How worthy are they outside of the kitchen? If an average working professional is a wonderful cook, then she probably belongs to the kitchen better, according to her colleagues. Maybe if a woman is dressed in a saree on a day-to-day basis, then she is supposedly a homemaker. If she welcomes guests with her home-cooked food, then other women assume she is a housewife like them. Tanvi Shukla deals with all these biases on a pro-rata basis. Her husband oscillates between respecting her in the bedroom and demeaning her in the living room. The only distinction here is Tanvi’s voice. She knows to speak for herself, and she knows to stand up for herself.

However, Patna Shuklla seems to be a strategic blend of the two stories we have seen recently. Raveena Tandon‘s Tanvi is a long-lost cousin of Bhumi Pednekar’s journalist in Bhakshak. Meanwhile, the plot and the storyline find similarities with Salman Khan’s niece Alizeh Agnihotri’s debut film, Farrey.

Produced by Arbaaz Khan, Patna Shukla slowly gains an important voice. But the film is a lost opportunity on what could be a simplistic small-town tale that is relatable and generates pathos at a maximum level.

Patna Shuklla Movie Review: Script Analysis

Written by Vivek Budakoti, Sameer Arora, and Farid Khan, Patna Shuklla picks up pace in its second in a somewhat predictable tale until the climax arrives. The film has a rocky journey with some good scenes and a good setup, but it gets lost in translation from its journey from paper to screen. But who is at fault, the writing or the execution? Probably both in parts.

Some points want you to root for the cause and the film, but you cannot collaborate your voices with the protagonist, for she is very loose in some parts and overpowering in others. You cannot connect with any of the other characters of the family, nor the father, or the son and the husband, for that matter!

The sense of urgency in Patna Shuklla is so lost that despite having a subject as strong as an education scam mixed with political agendas in Bihar, it keeps crumbling throughout.

Patna Shuklla Movie Review: Star Performance

Raveena Tandon plays a gutsy lawyer with a voice in Bihar’s capital, Patna. While her Tanvi Shukla is bland, Raveena tries her best to be relevant. However, her struggle is clearly visible in the absence of an author-backed role.

Apart from Raveene, none in the film have a strong arc to prove their mettle as artists. Right from Manav Vij, who plays the husband, to Anushka Kaushik, who becomes the central point of the entire story of the film, even the late Satish Kaushik, who acts as a judge in this courtroom drama, does not have a moment to shine. Chandan Roy Sanyal gets wasted as the opposition; meanwhile, Jatin Goswami, as the antagonist, struggles and succeeds to some extent with his rawness.