In a scene from Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, a young bride who knows her way around the kitchen but not around her neighbourhood, tells an old, disillusioned mother figure “Humein ghar ka sab kaam ataa hai”. To which this old, but worldly-wise woman responds with “Ghar jaana ataa hai?” It’s one of the many exchanges between women from different but equally repressed walks of life that illuminates this heartfelt little film. Be it mothers, mothers-in-law or independent loners, women must navigate the fire pits of masculinity, judgement and discrimination to score a fair chance at freedom of some sort. The nature of this freedom maybe could be counted on the tips of a trembling finger - an education, the right to draw or say-out-loud your partner’s name. Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies is a charming ode to unsaid friendships that lift the veil on female bonding at times of great, at times galling prejudice.
The year is 2001 and Deepak played by the excellent Sparsh Shrivastava is on his way back home, having just gotten married to the somewhat immaturely named Phool (Nitanshi Goel). On a multi-legged train journey somewhere across the MP, Chattisgarh and Bihar circuit, Deepak and Phool board a train occupied by other couples who have recently gotten married. In the dark and lazy confusion of midnight when their destination arrives, Deepak accidentally grabs and brings home Jaya (Pratibha Ranta), a newlywed on her own interstate journey. Thus begins a rollercoaster ride of rural eccentricities, bureaucratic ordeals and some welcome feminist abrogation of a world shaped by men. Even the pivotal mess, after all, is the consequence of a patriarchal instrument – the veil. It’s this veil that the film both literally and metaphorically sets out to lift.
There is a sense at first that Laapataa Ladies will turn into the haywire exfoliation of socio-political farce. It seems at first the reason to set this film 20 years ago. “Iss desh mein kuch samay pe kahan ata hai,” Deepak tells his father rhetorically after arriving with his bride. This is an India where loss - be it of life or of material property - is resigned to the whims of dysfunction. So what if a train is late, so what if a bag gets lost, so what if a woman goes missing? This is India, it happens.
The setting also assists the film prolong what must be an impossibility (though not entirely) today - losing someone. So while Deepak innocently searches for his missing Phool, the latter makes a home and a living at the very station she has been mistakenly abandoned on. The irony though is that at home, Phool would be suffocated, deprived of the oxygen that is economic and social leverage. At the station where she has been ‘left behind’ she is actually, sort of, free.
On the flipside, there is Jaya, a woman with ambition and secrets, whom life gives a comical second chance. A chance she decides to take at great personal and social cost. Though the satire isn’t always sharp, the film’s comic brevity is channelled by the unmissable Ravi Kishan as the corrupt cop trying to unroll the entire mess. It’s his scenes that truly unseal the potential of a film that can, at times, get lost in its own ledger of feminist transactions. There comes a point when you’ve heard a lecture far too many. But then there is no faulting the bountiful women’s gaze for going slightly overboard in leading their characters –the women especially – to fellow, wronged and maybe undermined peers. Who else would relate to the indignity of carrying the veil other than the women who have grown, crumbled or maybe rallied behind it?
Laapataa Ladies is endearingly shot, with Rao’s lens cooing over sights like railway stations, tea stalls and dank liquor kiosks. The world feels lived-in, scraped as if not just from picture books but also from the hive-minds of a generation that post-globalisation struck with this sense of wonder and confusion. In the film, for example, a mobile phone is given as dowry. An emblem of the economic distance from urbanity that gives Rao’s narrative, its spiritedness to casually, but amiably jog towards its tearful but wholesome ending.
Rao’s film is one of those feel-good dramedies that though it doesn’t quite push the bucket, ticks enough boxes to be emotionally transcendent. The music, the colourful tapestry of its world mixed with the otherworldly innocence of its characters ensures that the film’s prickly backdrop remains detached from its feel-good intent. The camaraderie rescues the direness as it unfolds. Maybe that’s the message and the sobering reality being revisited here. Centuries of unsaid, unacknowledged bonds that can only really be seen if history is wiped clear of its phallic patterns. While the Kings waged wars, won and lost kingdoms, maybe the women, noble and common, fought their own fights, built their own secret bridges. Women who lost themselves to the outline of the world yet found themselves in the eyes and ears of those who had worked around similar social compasses (read compulsions). Lost, but unofficially found.
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