Great premise, powerful theme, appropriate setting, super star quotient, raised on a lavish scale - Bombay Begums has it all to its advantage. It's not a chic flick mind you, it's about four women with their own growth aspirations while balancing the family and personal turmoils. Their playground is a fictional Bank in Mumbai that is in dire needs of a profile uplift, which is the newly appointed CEO Rani's (Pooja Bhatt) primary challenge. But she faces massive headwinds - an uncooperative board led by an unnecessarily grumpy Rituraj who looks constipated all the time, a difficult Corporate Banking Head, Deepak (Manish Chaudhary) with his own professional objectives that are at crossroads with Rani, and lack of original ideas to steer the bank forward.
Adding to her troubles are her stepson who after a drunken night with a prostitute runs over the latter's son inadvertently, plunging both family and Rani's reputation into darkness and giving a free access to the sex worker Lily (Amruta Subhash) to the bank boardroom to blackmail Rani into overt submission and meeting her own aspiration to set up a factory that she hopes will restore her pride and a place in the society. The other two women in the scene are an impressive Shahana Goswami playing Fatima, the number two to Rani, fighting her own personal family battles, trying to live up to the challenge of her professional pursuit, and a tormented Plabita Borthakur (Ayesha) who has a myriad of issues to tackle at the bank and in her own personal life.
You get the whiff, right? Bombay Begums straddles numerous sociopolitical, personal, professional issues mired in financial crimes, exploitation, sexual violence, extramarital affairs, corporate politics, workplace sexual misconduct, fertility problems, etc., the list is endless. Hence the series goes all over the place trying to tie the subjects together into a singular executable affair - women's struggle for the rightful place in society keeping their dignity intact. The series spreads itself too thin, like all other Alankrita Shrivastava offerings of the past. Pooja Bhatt is superlative and poignant in several episodes. Shahana Goswami is restrained, lowboy yet powerful in execution. Amruta Subhash and Plabita Borthakur grate on the nerves oh so successfully and that too in brilliant partnership with each other. The men are at best WASTED!
