Paurashpur – A show best avoided

Paurashpur, the latest Alt Balaji offering is a series which pretends to be bold and pathbreaking, pretends to be about fighting patriarchy and revenge, but in reality comes across as an erotica with very low production values and CGI.

Plot

Paurashpur is the fictional kingdom in the 16th Century, which is ruled by men who treat women just as objects of desire, lust and as slaves. The King Bhadra Pratap (Annu Kapoor) is the evil king who is impotent and keeps on marrying several princesses, who mysteriously keep on disappearing.

Queen Meerawati, first queen of Bhadra Pratap is the only queen surviving, given the fact that she neither confronts the king, infact makes arrangements for his pleasure. 

Bhadra Pratap’s one son is in love with one of the dasi, and the other one is in love with a guy. Amidst all these Bhadra Pratap ends up marrying the dasi who his son is in love with. And as the case is with others, she also disappears after the night of marriage

Also, there is a trangender character Boris (Milind Soman), who is the only character with some morals in the show. 

The show keeps on wandering between Bhadra Pratap’s distastefully filmed lovemaking scenes or the similar scenes between the other members of his family. 

Rest of the show tries to figure out what happened to the queens, what happens when finally a woman puts her feet down and decides to take on the male domination, and will the women of Paurashpur be able to throw Bhadra Pratap out, and get their respect in society.

The Hits

None. The promise which the show’s plot has shown in the trailers is the only positive of this otherwise lousy show.  The show is crisp with a total of 7, 20 min episodes, which is definitely a plus.

The Misses

The writing of Paurashpur is its biggest weakness as the show is never sure what it wants to portray. Its a confused show which oscillates between a erotic thriller, period drama, or a battle for women upliftment.

The story is all over the place with so many loose ends and loopholes, a bad performance from most of the actors and a very bad CGI and background music.

The direction and screenplay also leave a lot of scope for improvement and fail to create any interest for the viewers, the only feeling viewers can have is a repulsive vibe, given the execution of the lovemaking scenes.

Performances

Paurashpur has Annu Kapoor in a major role and he has been quite decent in a badly written role where his character has no arc. We have seen him giving performances which are many times better than this one.

Milind Soman as Boris is one of the best performers of the series, and still he is nowhere near his best, which gives an idea of how everyone else has performed.

Shilpa Shinde has looked beautiful and performed ably, but still has a lot of room for betterment. Rest all actors have been very average and disappointing.

FFC Take

Paurashpur is a very good idea, but the writing team never worked upon it in detail. The show which could have been a really good show, a period drama with the battle of sexes, boils down to a low budget erotic series, just like most of the Alt Balaji content.

This was shot in 22 days during lockdown, and clearly no effort has been put in any of the aspects of its making. The show is very bad to say the least and doesn’t deserve any effort from the viewers as well. 

Avoidable.