“Churials” Review: When Angry Asian Women Unite
Four disheveled women confess to an off-screen interrogating voice in dingy rooms: A boxer. A socialite. A criminal. A perfect wife. They are associated with a “female criminal organization” and apparently, something has gone wrong.
This is no Marc Cherry’s latest show, but the beginning of a thrillingly bold 10-episode Pakistani web series written and directed by British-Pakistani filmmaker Asim Abbasi. Titled “Churails” — witches or the ugly ghosts of impure women in Southeast Asian legends — the series challenges a long-standing stereotype of manipulative and aggressive women through a diverse cast of unabashedly angry female protagonists.
The story takes place in Karachi, Pakistan. After discovering her husband’s philandering ways, Sara (Sarwat Gilani) has a fatal epiphany. She drives to her girlfriend Jugnu’s (Yasra Rizvi) in her pajamas in the wee hours of the morning, and meets Jugnu’s new maid Batool (Nimra Bucha) and a young adult girl Zubaida (Mehar Bano) who has just been rescued from domestic abuse. Distressed in their respective woes, the four found a secret detective agency to provide truth for the women and punish cheating and abusive men under the slogan “Mard Ko Dard Hoga” (“Men Will Suffer”). The operation will take place under the guise of a fashion boutique in an elaborately decorated and equipped basement. The women self-proclaimed — in a combination of devil-may-care resignation and enraged reclamation — as “churails”.
Their business is simple: suspicious wives bring to the boutique’s back room worries and cash; the Churails investigate. The team has also recruited and supported “the Chosen Seven”, including a former prostitute, a trans woman, a hacker, an ambitious town girl and a lesbian ex-convict couple. Except Sara and Jugnu, the members of the team come from poor families struggling with social mobility and there is no hiding that among their central motives is to get rich. Important decisions of their operation are made through voting, while Sara takes up most of the day-to-day operational responsibilities. (The “boutique” is located in a vacant commercial building she has leveraged from her discouraging husband in the first place.) The basement doubles as a dorm for the Churails, which is surprisingly spacious to sometimes host 11 people with extra room. When Sara returns home after dark to her nice house and cute kids and Jugnu her mansion with endless bottles and shelves of luxuries, class distinctions among the Churails become harder to ignore.
There are many elements in the series reminiscent of American women ensemble shows, whether it be sitcoms centering women moving through life and juggling daily life problems from disappointing relationships to strained friendship and work problems, or mystery dramas that obsess over cliffhangers and “leave them wanting more.” From the expensive-shoes-and-glitter-slip-dress white-women-talking-about-sex type of feminism in “Sex and the City” to the more frank and even squalid representations of female sexuality in “Girls” or “Insecure”, stories about women striving for sexual freedom and social equality have continually reinvented themselves with more nuances. The more scheming women characters can be found in mystery dramas such as “Devious Maids” and “Why Women Kill”, who may bear more similarities to the Churails in their weaponization of their femininity for an end.
In stark contrast to these American show, however, is how the Churails, as a collective, are the focus of the story throughout the show. As viewers, we are less about the fate of individual women than whether or not this bewitching universe of women will hold together and make the operation work. The main actions are mostly driven by events directly related to their secret operation, despite the Churails’ different motives, lifestyles and social circles and relationships. In this liminal space, the otherwise different women are united with the single aim of uncovering truths and serving long-due justice. The much time they spend underground together not only motivates the plot but also drive home the theme of woman solidarity. Western counterparts rarely display or highlight this unity, as the reason that the women appear together is often haphazard and the main plot lines tend to give way to scattered individual ones, returning to their grand collective often at the episode or season’s end.
There is also the realist part that the show diverges from the western ensemble shows. Domestic violence, forced marriage, sex trafficking and not-so-implicit homophobia and racism are consistent themes in the series. It is entertaining to watch niqab-clad girls kicking handsy men in the pants or threatening male voyeurs with toy gun armors, but the more subtle thrills come from watching the women trudge through the moral quandary between business and relationships, truths and safety, fair play and foul game, and ideal and reality. As time passes, the Churails become more so united by a shared sense of commitment to justice, in this way, successfully transforming themselves into the powerful women vigilantes that Sarah first wished them to be. Abbasi managed to create Sarah with minimal class bigotry through meta-commentaries on class as well as dedicating screen time for the backstories of each of the Churails, except the disappointing omission of the slick and geeky hacker played by Meher Jaffri.
While the melodramatic plots, extensive use of flashbacks and flashforwards and over-saturated colors and emotions may thwart identification with the characters and reality of the many high-stake issues it brings out, the series remains revolutionary as the first of its kind in not only Pakistan but among the South and Southeast Asian regions. It may be jaw-dropping or empowering to watch cussing women-spies running around on screen in a Pakistani city, but its appearance should not be shocking. As the writer-director Abbasi say, “it is a Pakistani response to a very very global narrative… Patriarchal societies exist everywhere.”
“Churails” is streaming exclusively on the Indian online video streaming service Zee5 which serves 190 countries worldwide. American audiences can access it through VPNs.
