Wackiness can be found in every frame and every corner of Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper, but let's start with the main character's name. Tribhuvan means "king of the three worlds - heaven, earth, and hell." Manav Kaul's Tribhuvan, however, is only a king within the confines of his office cubicle. With honesty as his weapon, he banishes corrupt businessmen and builders who, by offering him cash, request his signatures on illegal papers. No amount of money, though, is able to break Tribhuvan's principles. He firmly sticks to his No Dishonesty rule, leaving some men, like his boss (Shrikant Verma), irritated. Tribhuvan's uprightness can also fill you with annoyance, but Kaul plays this role with such truthfulness that you find traces of someone in your family or maybe a next-door uncle in this character. Notice how he pauses for a few seconds before helping a shopkeeper with his financial situation. You can hear Tribhuvan making calculations and motivating himself with thoughts like, "Helping someone is the duty of a good human," before taking the shopkeeper to the ATM. A small moment like this frees Tribhuvan from the boundaries of the screen. In Kaul's hands, Tribhuvan becomes convincing. Hence, you find him more bearable than, say, Vinay Pathak's Madan Tiwary from Chintu Ka Birthday.
Do you know who else is present in Chintu Ka Birthday? Tillotama Shome. The 45-year-old actress can also be seen in Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper. As Bindi, Shome gives sexual dissatisfaction an intense layer of frustration. But it's not just sex that her body craves; her life is barren in terms of romance as well. Bindi exudes unhappiness so strongly that she almost looks desperate. While sleeping, she dreams of her romantic paradise where her husband dances like a Bollywood actor - she looks like a kid lost in a candy-colored wonderland. The song that plays is perhaps too appropriate: Ho munda mera sapne mein milta hai (My boy meets me in my dreams). That's the only place where Bindi looks happy with her husband, Teeka Ram Jain (Shubhrajyoti Barat) - in her dreams. Because, in reality, there is no sign of intimacy in this relationship. To accentuate this point, the series first shows us Tribhuvan flirting with his wife Ashoklata (Naina Sareen) and then cuts to the image of Teeka Ram and Bindi separated by a pillar in between. This visual is quite literal, and such literal-mindedness can be detected during other moments. For instance, when Tribhuvan asks a male escort, Vineet (Jitin Gulati), to become his teacher, he is seen sitting on the floor while the latter stands in front of him like a coach. What's more, whenever characters fire bullets at each other or we are placed inside a crazy scenario (enemies drinking and laughing together at a hotel), the camera swings sideways like an intoxicated person.
What all this means is that Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper isn't as rewarding visually as it is in terms of its writing. Bindi and Teeka Ram's marriage might not be as spicy as that of Ashoklata and Tribhuvan's, yet there are a few similarities between the men. Both Teeka Ram and Tribhuvan prioritize client satisfaction - their business depends on good ratings and recommendations from their customers. One man provides happiness through sex (Tribhuvan), while the other supplies the same through food and shady business (Teeka Ram). One can also draw similarities between Ashoklata and Teeka Ram on the basis of the praise they get for their cooking talent. Before Tribhuvan and Bindi's rendezvous, these parallels connect the two couples. The camera sharply focuses on a cake box during one of their sessions, as if informing us of Ashoklata's presence between these two characters.
Bindi gravitates towards movies because there is no color in her life. She looks at the big screen and fantasizes about an existence as great as the fictional one unfolding in front of her eyes. At one point, she even says films are a reflection of reality. Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper, though, comes with a warning: The mainstream movies do not resemble real life. Tribhuvan describes his profession as a debit-credit transaction. He offers pleasure for a few hours in exchange for some money. Movies are not so different from this debit-credit thing: You pay for the ticket and receive a joyful experience from the big screen. But if you start perceiving films as absolute truth, if you, like an onscreen hero, jump from a building, you will only set yourself up for physical and emotional injury. I am not sure if a message like this is required or even works in a show where events unfold with wild contrivances, pushing them into the realm of fantasy. It's fun to think about these things, and Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper is more enjoyable when you run it in your mind: A man who catches people committing adultery ends up with an unfaithful wife. A man who faints at the sight of blood stabs someone with a knife. Tribhuvan is so honest that he takes only four lakhs out of the twenty offered to him. There is a man who can merely count up to 17, and The Shining reference pops up in a place where you couldn't have imagined seeing it.
All these events sound amusing, and one can imagine writer Puneet Krishna high-fiving himself for coming up with such events. The problem, however, is that these developments are not very amusingly, imaginatively translated to the screen. Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper is lighted like most of the Netflix Originals (does Netflix offer a "style guide" to the filmmakers?). The images appear chintzy. The execution of some of the scenes is puke-worthy. For instance, Bindi and Ashoklata's enviousness is brought to the level of cheesiness when Ashoklata's daughter, in a mall, says, "Papa mummy ko bahut pyaar karte hai." (Cue sad music). And Krishna cooks up so much eccentricity that the clichés (Tribhuvan almost getting caught due to a tattoo) become a sign of exhaustion and creative bankruptcy. The show really stretches the borders of credibility during that yellow-scooters-on-the-road scene (everything about it is lousy).
Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper is jam-packed with characters and events, but not all of them are necessary (the "kids getting bullied in the school" thing leads to an abrupt dead end). Characters often receive text messages reminding them about payments, which you can take as the show's way of reminding us about the existence of these other side characters. Krishna is so blinded by his ambition that he fails to realize he doesn't need so many ingredients. A material like this works better when it's tight. Nine long episodes make Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper so loose that you struggle to find it appealing. Shweta Basu Prasad's character offers a nice mixture of toughness and domesticity, and she deserves her own film or a TV series. Here, she flickers instead of burning brightly.
A story like this has been told a million times before but through a female protagonist. By putting a male prostitute at the center, the series attunes itself to female pleasures and brings sex to the level of sympathy. This couldn't have been achieved with a female sex worker because her clients, all men, would have approached her only to fulfill their lust, not emotional needs. What Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper ends up saying is that women have various options around them - the men need to work on themselves if they want to continue having healthy relations with their wives. Again, all this sounds interesting, but after nine long episodes, you come out all weary and in urgent need of a good sleep.
Final Score- [6/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times