There are fine moments in Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster 3 that sum up the fury of one very twisted husband and wife pair.
In one particular scene, Madhavi (Mahie Gill) — the Biwi of the series who is now a government minister — forces a contractor to eat the special ladoos [sweets] he brought as a gift. No, the ladoos aren’t poisonous — at least to Madhavi. The contractor, though, has severe diabetes.
The contractor, wheezing and asphyxiating, realises his mistake a moment too late as he suffers from one ladoo after the other in his mouth on Madhavi’s orders. In his sincere bid to butter up to the newly-elected minister, the contractor forgot his place and made two mistakes. First, he spoke against her husband (who happens to be of aritstocrat lineage and also someone the contractor doesn’t personally know). Secondly, he broke a simple, unspoken rule of man-woman relations … only a wife has the license to hurt her husband.
Writer-Director Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film — the third in a continuing series — is pragmatic of grudges couples hold on to, twisting and balooning real-life emotional agitation into an epic battle of pride, anger (and in a weird way) love. No matter how much she loathes her husband, Madhavi would not allow anyone else to say anything against him.
For those who’ve yet to see any Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster films, the plots pivot round Aditya Pratap Singh (the Saheb, Jimmy Shergill) and his wife Madhavi, a power-hungry, philandering aristocrat couple who openly flaunt a fanatical fixation towards each other that leads to mutual hatred, double-crosses, revenge and death.
The bulk of this part, however, is concerned with the aftermath of actions after animalistic carnal tendencies takes over.
In a follow-up scene to the one mentioned above, Aditya stubbornly refuses his family’s advice to divorce Madhavi. After his arrival back home, the couple have an argument and end up making love on the palace rooftop.
Come morning, Madhavi finds herself alone on the roof in a state of partial undress, almost discovered by the house’s help. Aditya had left her alone in the middle of the night as a small token of payback for sending him to prison in the last part. Because of her wanton nature, her bareness wouldn’t be that big of a shock to the servants, he calmly reasons when she confronts him a few moments later.
These excellent checkmates of lust and revulsion are hampered by a badly written subplot of another royal family’s land dispute between a father and his sons (Kabir Bedi, Deepak Tijori and Sanjay Dutt). The film’s finale ultimately hinges on a deadly game of Russian Roulette, where one unlucky contestant gets a bullet in the head.
Dutt, in particular, acts like an amateur in a role he’s done countless times in awful action movies (one pities Chitrangada Singh, who plays his mistress in the movie).
Shergill and Gill, even though they have no story to go through whatsoever, are excellent. I sincerely hope Part Four — which this part leads into — explores the dark potential of these two deliciously evil characters.
The third instalment in the Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster series is devoid of a compelling story despite its deliciously evil aristocratic main characters while Nawabzaade is a just a train wreck of a film
Nawabzaade