Of all things, Anurag Kashyap's Choked will be remembered for its end-to-end middle-class Marathi household detailing. Saiyami Kher portrays bank teller Sarita Pillai, wife of (loafer, carrom-playing husband) Sushant Pillai (Roshan Mathew), in an extremely believable manner. It's evident in the body language, the dressing style, and even her transient expressions. Mathew is also quite impressive in his Bollywood debut, playing a struggling musician who speaks broken Tamil when irritated.
At first, I found it difficult to digest the fact that Mathew plays the father of a school-going kid in the film. But the writing in these bits is solid. Both the characters are given the kind of texture you'd expect in a Kashyap movie, sans the darkness. The exchanges between husband and wife, some of which seem improvised, hit the bullseye, especially in the first half. This is a film with a lot of supporting characters, primarily owing to its setting. The dingy apartment building and its surrounding premises are home to many a party-and-gossip-loving aunty with first world (homemaker) problems, nosy neighbours, and a large sum of unaccounted money.
I liked the set up of the premise. The depiction of Sarita's hum-drum daily life and the despair associated with it is a shining example of writing and crafting going hand in hand. The recurring shots of the door being locked and the light being switched off convey the monotony strikingly well. Once the husband-wife dynamic is neatly established, the story moves on to its pivotal incident - Sarita finding neatly packed bundles of currency popping out of her clogged kitchen sink. Equate this with 2016's demonetization and you have an interesting hook.
While the satirical bits around demonetization work (especially if you're in line with Kashyap's politics), the thrills fail to match up. Some subplots (about a laundering scheme and the reason behind Sarita feeling "choked" often) don't work to great effect. The finale looks like it was re-written to make it seem like just another feel-good flick. It just doesn't sit well with what we've known Kashyap for. Or maybe, I simply expect too much from him.
