Do You Wanna Partner review
Cast: Tamannaah Bhatia, Diana Penty, Jaaved Jaaferi, Neeraj Kabi, Shweta Tiwari, Nakuul Mehta, Rannvijay Singha, Sufi Motiwala, Indraneil Sengupta
Directors: Collin D’Cunha, Archit Kumar
Rating: ★★
‘Women in male-dominated fields’ is a popular internet meme these days. Normally, one shows a woman engaged in some toxic or patriarchal behaviour normally associated with men. The common thread is that these memes, on account of being funny, are devoid of depth. The same can be said of Amazon Prime Video’s new ‘behenhood core’ series, Do You Wanna Partner. Tamannaah Bhatia and Diana Penty play two BFFs trying to launch their own beer startup, navigating a man’s world. But alas, this show suffers from the male gaze epidemic, reducing the characters to caricatures, and offering very little connect despite a promising setup.
The premise
Shikha (Tamannaah) has been fired from her white collar Gurgaon job. She now wants to use the time to revive her father’s (Indraneil Sengupta) dream of making craft beer. Her best friend, marketing genius Anahita (Diana Penty) quits her own job, and the two set out to make beer. But they realise nobody wants to take two women making booze seriously. So they employ an actor (Jaaved Jaaferi) to play their make-believe boss, the enigmatic billionaire David James. But they end up biting more than they can chew, facing threats from a loan shark (Shweta Tiwari) and the liquor baron who betrayed Shikha’s dad years ago (Neeraj Kabi).
What works and what doesn’t
The only thing that works for Do You Wanna Partner is its tone. The light and breezy narrative never gets too tiring. Even when the story is meandering and the characters are falling into tropes, you don’t feel the show is weighing down on you or dragging a lot. That is because of the creators’ choice to keep it frothy.
But the froth is the undoing of the show, too. For a premise that had everything going for it, Do You Wanna Partner never takes itself seriously. These are real-world problems that women face all around the world, in every walk of life. Being reduced to just a face, not having your opinion taken seriously, and being delegated to a man is something every working woman has faced. There is always a way to show the gravity of it all while keeping it light. But the way Do You Wanna Partner deals with it seems very superficial, never actually tugging at you.
The two leads’ characterisation is perhaps the biggest problem. Both Diana and Tamannaah are fine actors who have been reduced to playing caricatures of strong but vulnerable women, as imagined by men. Their interactions often seem to lack the naturalness of how women behave in the real world.
The other characters do not fare much better either. Jaaved Jaaferi gets his quirk on as the actor with a past, and plays both the goofy Dylan and the charming David with equal panache. But Neeraj Kabi gets the short end of the stick. He showcases that he has the ability to turn it up in the comedy genre, but his one-dimensional character never allows him to be anything more than a comic book villain. Shweta Tiwari manages to impress briefly in the only role that has range. Her Laila is charming and dangerous all at the same time, and the actor captures that flawlessly.
The only human elements in the story come during the interactions between Tamannaah and Diana’s characters. Their friendship seems real, and their chemistry is apparent. The two actors do well to make the best of a raw deal.
To sum it up
Do You Wanna Partner seems to have come out of the assembly line of Indian OTT, which routinely churns out mid shows that are neither good, nor bad, but just there. It all has a ‘been-there-seen-that’ quality to it, further adding to the abundant mediocrity in the Indian streaming space. The show is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
