A quintessential housewife, who doesn't talk against her husband, makes good food and manages the association work and housework just fine. She keeps the matters of the house to herself and is always forthcoming with her recipes with other young women.
But is that all she knows?
Tisca Chopra's new short film explores the grey area between how naive we perceive these women to be and how much they really understand. Co-written by Jyoti Kapur Das and Tisca Chopra, who also produced the film, "Chutney" is a creepy concoction of sweet and sour and unfolds slowly and unsuspectingly.
A majority of the screen time is taken by Tisca Chopra who plays Vanita, the seemingly ordinary middle-class woman and Rasika Duggal, the vivacious and younger woman seemingly having an affair with Vanita's husband (played by Adil Hussain). There is no drama, but the underlying buildup more than makes up for it.
Watch the film here:
The short film was released on YouTube on Monday and has clocked over four million views since.
Chutney explores themes of love, jealousy and betrayal in the middle class. Tisca begins to tell Rasika about the story of their domestic help boy and what happened with him. She effortlessly adds tidbits about her own husband in between the narration, possibly to push Rasika into calling off the affair.
The entire conversation takes place over a bowl of hot pakoras and green coriander and mint chutney, which you will realise by the end of the story, turns out to have some murky history behind it as well.