What’s a film without a solid plot, a story line that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere? It’s Angry Indian Goddesses. It’s not often that one gets to see an Indian movie with an all-female lead cast and that got me pretty excited. ‘Female buddies’ catching up together, they called it and that seemed like a pretty cool idea too. I just wish they had done a decent job of expanding the concept of ‘female buddies’ to a mindblowing film with well-detailed characters and nuanced interactions.
Instead, we saw every kind of feminist stereotype thrown in together into a loose, motley kind of a group, whose dynamics sometimes just don’t seem real. We have one friend who is getting married, a former magazine photographer Frieda, played by Sarah Jane Dias, who invites a small, close-knit group of friends to Goa for her wedding, but keeps the identity of her life partner secret. There are some mysterious allusions to a dad who is not coming to the wedding without much elaboration and in the end, hey presto! Frieda is a lesbian getting married to a social activist – who by the way dresses in khadi with long dangling earrings and a matching headwrap (That sounds familiar to you?). So, so far, we have one lesbian couple where one is a Christian artistic type and the other is a Muslim NGO type.
We have ‘Mad’ Madhurita played by Anushka Manchanda, a struggling musician, who has attempted suicide a couple of times. Throw into this lot, Suranjana (Sandhya Mridul), a chain-smoking tough businesswoman in tow with her seven-year-old child, and who runs a mining operation (say whaaaat!) and Pammy (Pavleen Gujral), a seemingly empty-headed, but supposed to be bright student who got married right after college and is envious of the rest of them. And then, there’s an aggressive maid who goes around beating a guy because he killed her brother and she is awaiting justice and a flower-child cousin of Frieda’s from Canada who wants to become an actress.
There is a sort of fiery spunk in the movie, but it falls flat when interspersed with badly scripted allusions to current feminist issues, in the news today. They get eve-teased on the roads and they manage to fend them off, but then there is this all-too-forced discussion about the ’23-year-old physiotherapist in Delhi who got raped in a bus’ (Nirbhaya). It ends with just that, a force fit rather than an organic conversation, that spoiled my popcorn for me.
By the time it was intermission, we still couldn’t make out what the plot was. Ironically enough, it was very easy to predict the next scene based on the previous scene. It’s a feminist movie, so naturally the script included a rape incident too, involving the actress cousin. And we saw cops judging the women for the clothes they wore, the actress for the clothes she wore and naturally that’s why she got raped! Tick mark against stereotype four – victim blame.
She was walking alone on the beach while the girls partied and ended up with her tragic death. The girls are shocked and nobody knew who had done it. But then, here’s a convenient turn of events – Suranjana’s seven-year-old daughter, who incidentally loves to click photos on her phone actually got photos of the rapists first accosting Joanna and then overpowering her. The odd thing is that the child is depicted as thinking nothing about the episode and promptly going back to their jeep and falling asleep. No disturbed child questioning mummy about ‘what are the men doing to Joanna aunty….’
Oh yes, and Suranjana and Nargis are mortal enemies because Nargis is shutting her factory down. But seeing Nargis interact with her child, Suranjana forgives all and shuts down her mining operation as a wedding gift. Whoa! Some gift there.
It’s almost like they took every feminist or women’s issue in play today and stirred them all into a two-hour film, and never mind whether they fit in well together or not. Never mind whether it felt real or not. We keep talking about feminists being typecast as angry-bitter women who hate men. Well this isn’t that exact stereotype, but they are all stereotypes alright. Every single one of those characters are familiar as being a certain type, but unfortunately without the necessary depth in their characters.
Hollywood swears by something known as the Bechdel Test, which is used as an indicator for the active presence of women in films. This is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. Yet many good and well-made movies failed to make it to that list.
The Angry Indian Goddesses makes it the Bechdel list on every count and more and that’s what excited me. But keep aside the fact that this is first Indian movie to feature modern Indian women and their problems, keep aside the fact that this is the first feminist movie released in Indian cinemas, and you are left with something that is being called a movie. But it is really a hollow shell because there is no storyline holding it together. And that for me was the biggest disappointment.
Otherwise, they had a good experienced cast of actors who were as natural as possible under the circumstances, they had a gorgeous locale in Goa and a decent background score.
Having said that, I must add though that I look forward to many more women-centric films being done in Indian cinema.
