Saturday, March 08, 2014
Gulaab Gang
What A Waste
There is a scene in Soumik Sen’s Gulaab
Gang, in which a female politician wants to humiliate a minion, and makes
him crawl between the legs of a woman, who stoically lifts her sari and spreads
her legs—makes you wonder just who is being humiliated here and why. In another
scene, a bunch of vigilante women want to punish a man, so they make him wear a
sari and dance, underlining the common notion that there’s no worse insult for
a man than to be called a woman. So how come this film dares to say that it
espouses the cause of women?
The film does take its idea of a gang of pink sari clad women from
Sampat Pal’s much documented and feted Gulabi Gang (see Nishtha Jain’s superb
documentary released last month), but then goes on to make complete hash of it.
Sen’s film has no sense of the region, the problems of rural women or
even how the system functions in the vast Indian mofussil belt. All he does is
collect a gang of women in pink homespun saris led by Rajjo (Madhuri Dixit) in
low-backed ikat blouse, break into
dance or get into totally unbelievable action sequences.
Just who is this Rajjo (there is a clumsy flashback about a kid
determined to study and her nasty stepmother torturing her) and what she is all
about, you never know. Why this woman who is not even known to the collector of
the region is such a threat to an all-powerful politician Sumitra (Juhi Chawla,
dressed like Sushma Swaraj) is not clear either.
Once in a while a woman is battered, raped or killed, the man is
attacked by the Gang (Chatterjee, Divya Jagdale, Priyanka Bose, etc) and elsewhere,
Sumitra sneers or snaps at her cowering followers. There is not much plot, no character
development, and certainly no social comment.
Juhi Chawla steals every scene she is in, while Madhuri Dixit struggles
with an ill-defined role; her only brief seems to have been “be a heroine” so
she wears an ‘R’ shaped bindi, lots of kohl, sets her hair in waves and has a
kid pay tribute to her stardom by humming “Ek
Do Teen.” The best bits of this film
are in the promos—that’s all there is to it.
Labels: Cinemaah
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