Mrs Deshpande Review: Madhuri Dixit carries a kind of concentrated intensity that feels almost royal, as if certain characters arrive in her body already crowned. Across decades and drastically different worlds, she has proven a rare elasticity of presence, the ability to slip into a role and make it look less like performance and more like revelation.
Whether she was Pallavi Patel in Maja Ma, a closeted housewife standing at the trembling edge of self-acceptance, Bahaar Begum in Kalank, a courtesan draped in grace and quiet wounds, or the quintessentially sanskari Nisha Choudhury in Hum Aapke Hai Koun, Dixit has consistently made the emotional temperature of a scene rise simply by inhabiting it. And after watching Mrs Deshpande, Nagesh Kukunoor’s Indian adaptation of the French mini-series La Mante, it feels safe to say she has hit it out of the park yet again, in a clever, if imperfect, thriller that peels itself open like survival in Yakutsk: layered upon layered, and the more you strip away, the more you realise you are not just watching, you are sinking.
