Why you can’t pin filmmaker Homi Adajania down to a niche

Three years after his last film, the director is back with a new series, Saas, Bahu aur Flamingo

Tabloid journalism calls him the Cocktail director, while others call him an anomaly; some know him as stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania’s husband, while others as an eccentric filmmaker, but Homi Adajania is not one to be reduced to labels–he thinks of himself as a ‘visceral storyteller’. However, what is certain is that Adajania is one of the most talented filmmakers we have in the country today, with sensibilities so unique and refreshing that every project of his feels like it’s made by a different filmmaker–he laughs out loud at this, and says that “it is a bit of a schizophrenic graph, when you look at all the different content, and I like that I don’t know what I am going to do next.” 

In 17 years, his filmography consists only of a handful of projects, but Adajania practises what everyone else preaches–quality over quantity. He made his directorial debut with Being Cyrus (2006), after which he was under the radar for six years and then directed the commercially successful Cocktail (2012). He then went on to make Finding Fanny (2014), followed by Angrezi Medium (2020),both critically acclaimed. 

Saas Bahu aur Flamingo

Now Adajania gears up for his first web show, Saas Bahu aur Flamingo releasing on Hotstar+ on 5th May, starring Dimple Kapadia, Isha Talwar, Radhika Madan and Angira Dhar. It is about a group of women running an illegitimate and dodgy business under the guise of operating a cooperative. “I found it intriguing to have these women running this complete mad space without the men in the family being aware of it,”says Adajania. 

The writer-director claims that it is his own subscription to a certain amount of lawlessness that allowed him to create this bizarre world that has its own “system of morality.”The story came to him while traveling during which he met several gypsies whose every crease and wrinkle told a story.

“I realised that what gives you pain and what gives me pain, may be different things, but the pain itself is the same. We are so interconnected as human beings, so I wanted to tell this hyper-real story that is far removed from the urban space that we’re used to,” he shares. 

The world that Adajania creates is almost outlandish, marrying the spaces of a fictitious borderland to urban society. He understands that when you wish to create something out of nothing, as he has, a lot of filmmaking relies on belief. “I really need to be convinced that these characters exist. If I have that conviction then I have the ability to make the audience believe that they exist and give them a sense of reality,” he proclaims.

Gender dynamics

The women in Adajania’s show are extremely badass, perform some excellent action sequences and steal the show with their manipulative mind games. However, when asked about the same, the director says that while he is happy that people are noticing the rawness of the action, it’s also sad in a way because the reason people are talking more about it is because women are doing it. 

“I don't see any differences in equality between a man and a woman apart from the physical. When you sit up and notice that a woman is doing stunts, you’re enforcing the stereotype that they are stepping into the shoes of men because action is perceived to be something that they do normally, which shouldn’t be the case,” he says.

However, for Adajania, even whilst the show is being labelled as a female-led crime thriller, the question has never been about making a feminist or a female-led show, but only about telling a story. A testament for the same is his entire filmography, which has female characters that are more than just arm candies, not because progressive women-driven films were in vogue, but because that’s just how the filmmaker operates. “More than a filmmaker, that's how I am as a person. I think till I was in my mid-teens, I had absolutely zero idea of the inequality between the sexes; I grew up with very powerful women around me, so I was quite naive about it. So it's like there's something missing in my brain, I cannot fathom it.” 

He further adds that he finds women to be far more fascinating characters than men because they are layered in ways that men aren’t, which is why strong and real female characters come to the forefront very organically. 

No labels, only love

Adajania, all that said, is a more instinctive than pragmatic, whether it comes to life or films, governed passion over reason, which is probably why you can never pin him down to a niche, or a brand like you can perhaps do so with someone like Sanjay Leela Bhansali or Rohit Shetty or Karan Johar. 

However, that is the very reason the filmmaker is, at times, such a mystery to film buffs and audiences alike. “We love to put people in boxes and label them, so it is a victory for me, to not be burdened by the expectation of what someone else has predicted of me, because they can’t guess what I am going to do next. I don’t like formulas; I am an adrenaline junkie, I love being scared, it brings me alive.” 

It is this intuitive attitude that made him to make his first film, Being Cyrus, because he wanted to tell a story, and see what was the great hue and cry about making films, after which, he even considered “going back and being a dinosaur,”until his producer called him three years after, asking him to make films, because he knew how to. 

Adajania’s hunger to do things that he feared doing, even pushed him to direct one of the most successful rom-coms Hindi cinema has produced in recent times–Cocktail. The reason he did the film was not because he “cared for the story, but because I had no idea how to do the whole song and dance, so I did it because I wanted to glide into this unfamiliar space of archetypal romantic comedies and make it my own.” 

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