Laapataa Ladies Review: Emotionally Engaging Film Laced With Doses Of Wry Humour

A nonetheless from Laapataa Women. (courtesy: YouTube)

Kiran Rao returns to the director’s seat nicely over a decade after her debut movie, Dhobi Ghat (2011), with a piece that strikes the fitting notes. She does away with marquee names in Laapataa Women, produced by Aamir Khan Productions in affiliation with Kindling Photos, and employs three first-timers in a full of life story of two brides caught in a horrible mix-up.

Laapataa Women places hinterland ladies entrance and centre and makes its factors about gender equality unambiguously. The screenplay is, nevertheless, neither screechy nor shrill. It might not be totally refined about what it’s driving at, nevertheless it doesn’t overplay its hand in any method.

Two newly married village ladies who discover themselves in a critical disaster. It is not of their making. In on the lookout for an finish to their troubles, they study, every in her personal means, that there are methods to dispel the darkness round them.

It’s 2001. In fictional Nirmal Pradesh, two brides, on their means house with their respective husbands, get swapped in a passenger prepare. Within the unsettling however life-altering chaos that ensues, they uncover themselves and are by no means the identical once more.

Phool Kumari (Nitanshi Goel), barely out of her teenagers, is left stranded at a railway station when her husband Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastav) alights from the prepare holding the hand of one other man’s identically attired and veiled bride (Pratibha Ranta) travelling in the identical compartment.

When Deepak reaches his village house with the girl who just isn’t his spouse, he and his household are confronted with the repercussions of the embarrassing slip-up. The bride introduces herself as Pushpa Rani. Deepak has no clue the place Phool, the lady he married, has disappeared.

He and his mates search excessive and low for the lacking bride over the subsequent few days. They lodge a criticism on the native police outpost however Inspector Shyam Manohar (Ravi Kishan) just isn’t a person given to swinging into motion. If something, he solely aggravates matter.

Pushpa, on her half, doesn’t seem overly bothered that she is not the place she must be. She even begins to develop a bond with two ladies within the household – Deepak’s mom Yashoda (Geeta Agrawal Sharma) and his sister-in-law Poonam (Rachna Gupta). And thereby lies a story that incorporates the seeds of a riot.

Phool and Pushpa (each are Hindi phrases for flower) are temperamentally completely different. The previous is grief-stricken, a little bit of a babe within the woods who can not even identify the village she was headed to. The latter has her wits about her. She makes the many of the freedom {that a} house the place she doesn’t belong unintentionally grants her. Pushpa is a bride with out the attendant shackles as a result of she is not in the fitting place.

For poor little Phool, left to fend for herself in an unfamiliar, even maybe unsafe, place, surviving in a single piece is a problem. She finds assist in the type of a chirpy Chhotu (Satendra Soni), who does odd jobs for a rail platform tea and snacks kiosk run by the feisty Manju Maai (Chhaya Kadam).

Manju Maai, who has rid herself of an alcoholic husband and a parasitic son and has no qualms about it, takes Phool underneath her wings and begins to impress upon her the significance of not letting matrimony turn out to be a millstone round a woman’s neck.

The distinction could seem a contact contrived at first flush. However look deeper and the 2 incipient mutinies, one by a girl who has a purpose, the opposite by an ingenue who has no choice, start to make sense. The misplaced girls are two sides of assertion within the face of a grave disaster.

Tailored from a narrative by Biplab Goswami and scripted by Sneha Desai (who has additionally written the dialogues with further inputs from Divyanidhi Sharma), Laapataa Women is a social satire with a pronounced feminist accent that offers the movie its rationale.

The movie is breezy and light-weight on its ft. It’s by no means, subsequently, in peril of being slowed down by the weighty points that it addresses. Its easy clarion name is in favour of the rights of ladies who’re robbed of their desires post-marriage and it’s couched in easy strategies that don’t search to attract an excessive amount of consideration to themselves.

Admittedly, the movie is not saying something notably radical however the method during which it articulates its considerations is knowledgeable with commendable thrust. One factor that Laapataa Women definitely is not is heavy-handed. It eschews extra. It says what it has to and strikes on.

The menace that looms over Phool and Pushpa – a part of it emanates from the police inspector hell-bent on cashing in on the misery that Deepak is in as a consequence of the unintentional swap – exists solely on the sides of the world that the laapataa girls inhabit.

The social satire hits house as a result of it isn’t solely emotionally partaking, it additionally laced with doses of wry humour. Laapataa Women is an ‘subject’ movie that doesn’t fail to be entertaining. With out taking part in down the gravity of Phool and Pushpa’s predicaments, it finds area for hope within the bleakest of conditions. That aside, the movie throws well-directed punches at patriarchy, the evil of dowry, home violence and gender roles thrust upon ladies in wedlock.

The three younger leads are splendidly forged. Nitanshi Goel conveys a mix of fragility and optimism with minimal effort. Sparsh Shrivastav (of Jamtara fame) is stable. Pratibha Ranta is a show-stealer.

Among the many supporting actors, Ravi Kishan because the cop whose position within the story goes past simply policing is terrific. Geeta Agrawal Sharma, forged as Deepak’s spunky mom, is, as at all times, pitch-perfect. And what does one say of Chhaya Kadam? She radiates brilliance.

A number of of the tertiary actors are additionally noteworthy. No matter how a lot footage the movie apportions to them collectively and individually, they stand out. Satendra Soni, Rachna Gupta taking part in Deepak’s sister-in-law and Durgesh Kumar as a slow-on-the-uptake constable contribute their mite to the movie.

Laapataa Women will get a lot proper {that a} blip right here or a blemish there can do no harm to the best way it shapes up.