Farzi , by director duo Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, is a crime thriller starring Shahid Kapoor and Vijay Sethupathi in lead roles.- To date, Raj and DK have written 8 movies (directing 7 of them) and 2 shows, of which The Family Man is the most successful.
- They also have three highly anticipated series in the pipeline - Guns & Gulaabs, Gulkanda Tales, and the Indian adaptation of Citadel.
Only a handful of these projects, however, leave a mark on the audience. Going by the critics’ reviews and fan comments, the crime thriller Farzi, by director duo Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK aka Raj & DK, is well on its way to becoming one such show.
Farzi marks the OTT debut of actor Shahid Kapoor and the Hindi-language debut of Tamil actor Vijay Sethupathi. It chronicles the journey of a talented sketch artist, Sunny (played by Kapoor) who produces counterfeit money to initially save his grandfather - but later, succumbs to the greed of easy money.
Sethupathi, meanwhile, plays a sassy cop with a penchant for personal mess and professional success- similar to Raj and DK’s other talented spy, Srikant Tiwari from their hit series The Family Man.
Farzi also stars Kay Kay Menon, Raashii Khanna and Bhuvan Arora in pivotal roles, along with brief but important cameos by Zakir Hussain, Kubbra Sait and Amol Palekar, among others. Though the concept is a tad more common and predictable than their other projects, Farzi still manages to hook your interest - thanks to impeccable performances. The eight-episode-long series released on Amazon Prime Video on February 10 and is trending worldwide – it’s in the Top Ten on Prime in Australia, the US, the UK, UAE, Singapore and Canada
Littered with references to The Family Man and even a minute callback to their earlier film 99, Farzi makes for a memorable addition to Raj and DK’s filmography, and their spy universe.
Raj and DK made their debut with the romantic comedy Flavours in 2003. Today, their filmography includes a sci-fi romantic comedy (Glitch), India’s first zombie-comedy (Go Goa Gone), and a nuanced crime-drama (Shor in the City), among others.
What’s common across their projects is an acute understanding of the world their protagonists inhabit - be it the working-class professionals who hate Mondays in Go Goa Gone or frustrated fathers caught between demanding children and bosses in The Family Man.
In Farzi too, Kapoor’s mini monologue on the tragedy of being a middle-class Indian in the country has started doing the rounds on social media for being “relatable AF” - in the words of millennials and GenZs. Of course, the credit for this partially goes to the show’s co-writers, Suman Kumar and Sita Menon. Kumar also worked with the duo on The Family Man.
But it’s also to do with how Raj and DK pursue a story - through detailed research, a healthy dose of sly humor, and in their own words, lots of writing:
“Our writing process is extremely clinical – from the plot to the history of the characters, the screenplay – we want everything to be on paper. Also, we write a lot. Like a lot. We always want to have a lot of material to bounce things off. Some stories resurface because they were written for a different time. Sometimes two scripts merge to create something like Stree, which was in a different shape originally. The same goes for Family Man too,” shared DK with GQ India.
Raj and DK produced Stree and also wrote the screenplay, with Sumit Arora writing the dialogues and Amar Kaushik directing the film.
However, the duo has also pandered to commercialisation at times and indulged in overused tropes and cliches (for example, Happy Ending). While largely entertaining, none of their projects were as well-developed, and consequently as well-received, as Stree or The Family Man - arguably their most successful projects to date.
So far, Raj and DK have written eight movies (directing seven of them) and two shows. Though half of their films failed at the box office, almost all of their projects have acquired a fan base – with few attaining commercial success and others falling into the category of cult cinema.
The duo also has three highly anticipated series in the pipeline - Guns & Gulaabs, Gulkanda Tales (written, not directed), and the Indian adaptation of Citadel.
Guns & Gulaabs, which includes the stellar ensemble cast of Rajkummar Rao, Dulquer Salmaan, Adarsh Gourav and Gulshan Devaiah, is yet another crime comedy. Meanwhile, Citadel is a science-fiction action-drama starring Varun Dhawan and Samantha Prabhu. The original American version has been created by the Russo Brothers (of Marvel fame) and stars Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra in lead roles.
Just like the anti-hero of Farzi, few ‘artists’ in Bollywood possess the talent to break stereotypes and surpass tropes to create interesting content in a genre as cluttered as crime and comedy. Raj and DK are well on their way to not only attaining this tag but perhaps, even transitioning into auteurs - defining the genre, rather than just contributing to it.
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