It’s again time to create some new unrealistic wardrobe and life expectations while watching Damini, Umang, Anjana and Siddhi down way more than just four shots. The four girls are back with season two of Four More Shots Please, and their life continues to seem quite absurd, but their friendship is stronger.
The first season of this Amazon Prime’s original series ends up with the BFFs getting into a fight and breaking off with each other. The season two opens with the girlies reuniting in Istanbul and sharing their men related troubles over some Turkish ice cream. The reconciliation happens pretty quickly, and then rest of the season keeps throwing meaningless curveballs at you.
After the patch up, all four of them return to their jobs and home in Mumbai. There they continue to wear red carpet dresses and sit in the junkyard of their favourite bar, the Truck Bar and down bottomless champagne glasses.
Anjana doesn’t know what to do with her baby boyfriend, who is already dreaming of becoming the man of the house. Damini decides to leave all boy drama behind and write a book on a murdered court judge, which she does but also ends up getting pregnant. Umang, whose character is strong and well played, is still in love with her actress girlfriend Samara (Lisa Ray) and runs behind her like a puppy. It also turns out that Samara has bipolar disorder, a subject that needed to be dealt with more sensitively. The subject of mental illness in Indian films/web series often falls flat or goes overboard, but this is just…bad.
Siddhi is the only character who seems to have transformed initially. However, just a couple of episodes down and you know she is still daddy’s little girl who won’t ever act like an adult. We know that the storyline is about celebrating women, giving them the power to be whoever they are, unapologetically. In retrospect, at some point, you are supposed to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them over and over again. The season begins to look more and more like the same-mess-that-you’ve-created-before.
Even though the show suffers at basic things like outfits, make-up and lighting (everything is overdone) which clearly indicates poor production but it does touch upon various stigmatised and important topics - from open marriage to infidelity to misogyny to body image positivity to LGBTQ rights to mental illness to anti-nationalism. However, it doesn’t delve much deeper instead, it gives a very unrealistic depiction of the reality.
Some parts of the show are so unrealistic that they are borderline blunders. How do these girls afford this designer-privileged lifestyle when they work as a fitness instructor, a lawyer and a journalist.
If there’s a layered secret formula to it, wouldn’t we all love to know and adapt the same in our lives post-pandemic?
Then there is the concept of being a weed smoker. You can’t just casually walk out of a café and start rolling a joint while standing on the pavement, even if it is a metropolitan city. The best blunder is a part where Damini tells her parents that she is eight weeks pregnant over a small video call while taking a cab home. Their answer? Her “modern Indian parents” are so on board to help her with the baby that they don’t even ask who the father is.
The show only carters to the metropolitan crowd and will only appeal to those who dream about the big-city life. However, the ground reality is quite different, where girls still can’t even make their own decisions.
With one emotionally charged event following another, the girls keep coming back in their designer dresses and excessive make-up throughout the show. For anyone who has watched the previous season knows that the plot was wayward, dialogues cringeworthy and all of it revolving around privileged people stuck in their meaningless problems.
Pandemic or otherwise, in our conflict-torn world, people’s connect with such trivial problems will dictate their likeness for this show.
