Patna Shukla

Directed by Vivek Budakoti, produced by Arash Khan, and written by Vivek Budakoti, Farid Khan, and Sameer Arora, and with a runtime of two and a half hours, Raveena Tandon’s performance as lawyer Tanvi Shukla from Patna in ‘Patna Shukla’ is a good watch.

The story revolves around a small-time lawyer and housewife who fights a case against the education mafia. Her family's safety comes under threat while she leads her battle against corruption.

Tanvi being the perfect wife, mother, and lady, BEFORE she gets to her workplace, and wahaan bhi the first thing she does is offer everyone homemade laddoos, She isn’t exceptionally good at her job either, just about average. And through her, the film is asking its audience, just HOW perfect do you expect women to be, to give them the same amount of respect you give men automatically?

She doesn’t have lofty ambitions, but she has dignity, and her own ways of questioning when she’s not treated with the respect she knows she deserves. Tanvi is always ready with the perfect dialogue, put together in the face of adversity, talking emphatically to her son like she’s his favorite aunt meeting him after a month.

Tanvi’s husband Mr. Shukla, played by Manav Vij quietly realizes the error of his ways, and quietly goes about fixing both the relationship and his contribution to systems that perpetuate inequality, in a way you rarely see actualized in cinema. When the oppression isn’t always loud, course correction can be subtle too. A husband who unlearns and learns on his own is as rare as a film in present-day bollywood calling out social evils like “bulldozer justice” as a nefarious power movie.

‘Patna Shuklla’ dives into the education scam of roll numbers that affect the lives of thousands of earnest students in India.The case at hand is that of a college girl, joh convinced hai uske exam sheet ke saath dhokha hua hai, and despite recounting, she wants to press charges against the university. What seems like a simple scenario of error in assessing her paper properly, turns out to be a larger conspiracy, a scam even, involving a prominent politician, poised to win the next elections.

Anushka Kaushik, plays Rinki Kumari, the student who brings the case against her university, is an absolutely stellar performer and I dare say, if it weren’t for her, and the absolute fire charisma of Chandan Roy Sanyal, each time he appears on screen, this film would have fallen apart quite spectacularly. Satish Kaushik, in another posthumous performance, is every bit the entertainer he always was, here as the judge presiding over the case. You drown out the BGM and ignore everything else in the frame that yells “basic”, each time Satish Kaushik takes the stage, whether he’s picking a gavel from his bag, or buying tamatar at the sabzi mandi. Another male character who learns and unlearns in his own time, without laying the blame on women, or their need to have agency.

Patna Shukla reads like a larger commentary on how rules of law are prone to hijacking by those with any amount of power, in all levels of society, highlighting the importance of an unbiased judiciary is, to ensure we don’t further devolve into chaos. Ending was obvious, but they way they reached there was quite unexpected. 

Good watch!