Lara Dutta, Rinku Rajguru's Disney+ Hotstar show Hundred shows women as 'layered, complicated and fun', says director

Director Ruchi Narain says her upcoming show Hundred is an action comedy that dwells on the fun side of two women thrown together by circumstances.

Ruchi believes a lot of the content on OTT platform is of serious nature whereas she wanted to entertain viewers by showing the fun side of women, who are often portrayed as either good or evil.

“As avid consumers of content on OTT, we felt that everything is very serious and intense. We wanted people to have a chance to lighten up, go on a random ride without taking anything too seriously, Ruchi told Press Trust of India in an interview.

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“As a woman, I really wanted to show women as they are even in the face of constant opposition, expectation and judgement. Women are layered, complicated and fun. I’ve had enough of seeing the ‘noble’ portrayal of women or the completely evil scheming side,” she added.

Rinku Rajguru of Sairat fame and Lara Dutta headline the new Disney+Hotstar series, which is directed by Ruchi, Ashutosh Shah, and Taher Shabbir.

Ruchi said she is a big fan of Marathi cinema and saw Sairat first day first show and she was charmed by Rinku’s performance.

When she began writing Hundred, she only had Rajguru in mind for the character of Netra Patil, a young woman forced to re-evaluate her life when she finds out that she is terminally ill and has only 100 days to live.

The director said she chose Dutta to play ACP Saumya Shukla as she was apt for the role.

“We wrote the character for her (Rinku) and we never had a second choice. Once the show was written, I felt Lara would be the best cast (as the cop). The character’s conflict is that she gets pigeon-holed because she is a good looking woman but there’s much more to her than her looks or the fact that she’s a woman. She has many layers, good and bad. Lara’s tongue-in-cheek performance will be a revelation for all,” Narain said.

The series is an action comedy as Ruchi didn’t want to take anything ‘too seriously’.

“So keeping the pace and story and constantly breaking it with scenes and moments of lightness, irreverence, and humour was the creative challenge, she added.

The story revolves around a terminally ill girl who while looking for thrills, is hired to be an undercover agent by an ambitious female cop looking for a promotion. As they both unite to accomplish their goals in 100 days, chaos ensues.

Ruchi said writer Abhishek Dubey came to her with the basic idea about a young middle-class Maharashtrian girl, who finds out her life is about to end.

In ideating along with my partners Ashutosh Shah and Taher Shabbir, we ended up creating the ACP’s character and that led to Hundred’. It was such a fun ride to create this show because we decided irreverence was the best route. The series is about fulfilling one’s goals and desires, which Ruchi believes are given to us by society. We all get so caught up in our daily mundane routines that most of the time we put off what we really want to do and dreams remain dreams. But often these ‘dreams’ are ‘given’ to us by society or advertising or someone else,” the director said.

The series will stream on Disney+ Hotstar VIP from 25 April.

Ruchi recently helmed Netflix’s Guilty and now her show is on another streaming platform. Ruchi said she is having fun exploring the new medium.

“I love this OTT revolution. It will change content and viewers for the better. The film industry is very insular and likes to keep it that way. It is also very heavily reliant on images that are built with utmost care. OTT will allow the merit of the content to shine. The democratisation for storytellers and subjects is a welcome change,” she added.

(With inputs from Press Trust of India)

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