Cast: Ratna Pathak Shah, Konkona Sensharma, Aahana Kumra,
Plabita Borthakur, Vikrant Massey, Sushant Singh, Shashank Arora, Vaibhav
Tatwawaadi, Jagat Singh Solanki
Director : Alankrita Srivastava
Rating: 3.5 stars
occasionally the threat of a ban is the best thing to happen
to a film. Specially if the filmmakers decide to fight back, and win : from
being the kind of film which potentially could have remain a festival-fringe,
‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’ has arrived in theatres this week, all guns blazing,
giving us the finger. And I can tell you that it’s extremely worth your time,
and your thoughts : this is exactly the kind of film we need more of, with its
deep, personal, political and authoritative look into women’s lives, which says
what it needs to, and makes its points, without being preachy or polemical, or whipping
our heads with it.
Four women, based in Bhopal, going about their lives. At one
level, it’s as simple as that, the happenings in the film. On another, the
particularity of their situation has general resonance. And through the comings
and goings, ‘Lipstick’ draws an unerring picture of how women are bound, by reunion
and tradition, and of their middle lives and other bond which keep them going.
Ratna Pathak Shah’s `Buaaji’ is the matriarch of a crumbling
mansion that is on the radar of greedy corporators and a bunch of rent-seekers.
Buaaji is the moral centre of Hawai Mahal, and her being a manifestly chaste
middle-aged widow allows her to wield ability over the other residents, which
includes the other three women, and their families.
Shireen (Sensharma) is the look after of three, and put-upon
wife of a boor (Singh) who believes that wives are useful strictly to bear and
rear offspring, and be pliant bed-warmers. ‘Biwi ho, biwi ki tarah hi raho'.
Leela (Kumra) runs a hole-in-the-wall beauty parlour when the ‘mohalla’-women
come to get threading-and-waxing jobs. Leela is a frankly ***ual creature, and
doesn’t care who knows it: whether it is `boy-friend’ (Massey), or potential
groom (Tatwawaadi). And the youngest, college-going Miley Cyrus fan Rihana
(Borthakur) is struggling to find her voice, literally and metaphorically. Her
orthodox parents are as stifling, as is the cruel evaluation of her cool status,
or the lack of it, by her elegant college-mates.
What makes ‘Lipstick’ the film it is, is the truthful, frank
mode in which female desire and fantasy is treated, running like a strong,
vital thread through the film. Dreams can keep you alive, and age is just a
number. The beginning of Buaaji, who has almost forgotten her name, is a
revelation, crafted from pulpy, erotic literature, a girl called Rosie who is
free to love and lust, and a well-muscled swimming coach. Shah is terrific. As
is Sensharma as the wife who wants to grow wings. The younger women, both Kumra
and Borthakur, are brilliant as well. And the supporting cast is a delight:
each one has been chosen well, and has a explicit arc and function, a rarity in
typical Bollywood.
There are a couple of niggle. In the way a character’s
chafing at her small-town prospect plays out, and in the extreme, contrived
reaction to the big reveal of another character. But these are easily ignored
when we look at the big picture, which is superbly subversive. What the film
says is something we’ve always known but bears endless iterations - that
confinement is not associated only with a burkha. Any kind of restriction, allowed
by long-standing patriarchy and deep misogyny, is equally shackling.
The profound red lipstick (Buaaji would call it ‘lipishtik’)
becomes the colour and mode of rebellion, giving us a hint of what goes on
inside—the turmoil, the pain, the swallow humiliation, the unshed tears, the
unspoken hatred and anger. It is precisely this that is so problematic for the
naysayers (including the CBFC which tried so hard to ban the film) who want to
keep women safely ‘inside’ home and hearth : if `ladies’ start getting
`oriented’, and if films start showing it, what, gasp, may come about
A song I love goes : wherever do you go to my lovely, when
you’re alone in your head? ‘Lipstick Under My Burka’ takes us into that space,
and lets its characters out, to start on foot down forbidden paths, finding
support in sisterhood, and in the recognition that we all have tinted lenses of
Rosie in us. It is a film to be celebrated. Take a bow, producer Prakash Jha,
director Alankrita Srivastava, and the entire cast and crew. And now justification
me while I go looking for my sincere, reddest lipstick.
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