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Ankahi Kahaniya on Netflix

A ‘hatke’ anthology on love

Director Abhishek Chaubey once again is the shining star in yet another Netflix anthology, this time it is about three love stories based in Mumbai. While all three stories in Ankahi Kahaniya – the first by Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, the second by Chaubey and the third by Saket Chaudhary – deal with longing, hurt, isolation and the side of love that isn’t usually talked about, Chaubey’s 37-minute adaptation of Jayanth Kaikini’s Kannada story Madhyantara is hands-down the best. In Chaubey’s film, Rinku Rajguru and Delzad Hiwale play two young people, one a film buff the other an usher, whose story progresses through meetings at a single screen theatre merging reality with a fairy-tale. Abhishek Banerjee stars in Tiwari’s film about a man who loves a mannequin, while Zoya Hussain and Kunal Kapoor deal with questions of infidelity in Chaudhary’s closing film in the anthology, the actors doing a great job even in the lacklustre stories.

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