"Bedhadak, Besharam aur Beparwah," is what Sukhee, the eponymous protagonist of this film, believes a woman should be. It's a silent dictum however that most women struggle to follow, or as is the case with her, struggle to hold onto. Contemporary notions around womanhood, after all, almost necessitate conformity to the extent that even the freest of spirits must eventually fold into the acrimonious design of a life stuck on the precipice of a self-image. You live close to the edge, a moment’s distance from jumping, but never quite manage to take that leap. In Sukhee, a woman just about does, for it is a woman's gracious battle to reclaim her lost selfhood. And it does so with a grammar that neither tips the cart nor shakes its modesty. It’s what makes this film both soft, convenient and in a mainstream sense, affecting.
Sukhee follows Sukhpreet, played by Shilpa Shetty, a benevolent if spirited housewife in the fictional Punjabi town of Anandkot. Sukhee has a young nerdy daughter, an overworked and somewhat bitter husband in Guru (Chaitanya Choudhry) and an ailing father-in-law also named Sukhpreet. Burdened by her everyday duties, she plays housewife when needed, mother when provoked, neighbour when blackmailed and friend when pushed away (her scenes with her ailing father-in-law are dripping with tenderness and heart).
A school reunion, engineered by her comparatively perky friends (which includes Kusha Kapila), re-contextualizes for Sukhee her grim present. She hasn’t exactly been in a toxic marriage but sometimes it takes the pit stop of nowhere to realize you have been in a thankless one. It’s what this reunion supposedly kindles as a way of emotional turmoil inside the relatively unostentatious Sukhee.
Off the bat here, Shetty is pitch-perfect as the dogged but soft protagonist. Even in moments when she pushes back against the prevailing sentiment that a mother only ought to play herself, Shetty comes across as disarming but poised. After she accidentally messes up her husband's hunt for a lucrative contract, Sukhee seeks breathing space in Delhi, a city she left in a hurry. Both Sukhee and Guru married against the will of their parents, which transforms the ruins of their once enviable chemistry, into a mausoleum of Bollywood’s favourite cliché – marriage as happy ending. This is instead about the lives that drift once the hysteria of the band, baja and baraat becomes the distant past. School friends reunite to do some amicably Delhi things, like go on diarrhoea-inducing food trails and some not-so-Delhi things, like ride horses. Succour turns to provocation when another forgotten chapter from the past flips itself back into contention.
Sukhee’s temperature, as a cinematic nerve, is tepid. Its geometry fairly domestic. It does awkward things with the weight of resistance hanging by its shoulders. It has a familiar tone, a trained intimacy and fairly chummy character outline for each of its women. But beyond all that candyfloss of friendly fire, insults masquerading as freedom, and literal horses standing in for untamed men, Sukhee has a beating heart. And it conjures conflict without the ridicule of violence. It gently nudges the conscience without wanting to shock it into paying attention. There is the obvious risk of fitting far too many messages and lessons into one film, but it is dwarfed by the tenderness and accessibility of the film’s neighbourhood setting, its shy streets and modest appearances. Apart from the silly horse-riding, Sukhee does relatability quite well.
Directed by Sonal Joshi, Sukhee is modelled around a familiar skeleton, worn comfortably by actresses far more adept than Shetty (the late Sridevi in English Vinglish comes to mind for one). But to this role she imports a doughy lightness that helps the narrative both last and ultimately dissolve. She is radiant, but rarely in a screen-eating way, her glamour utilized here for effect – for the most part - as opposed to the erasure of everything inelegant surrounding her. That said there is something to be said for these roles going to women who, unlike Shetty, actually look their age. Also for freedom to look like something other than binge-eating, manic alcoholism and profanity. For now, though, we must piggyback the star, in search of the constellation that delivers a message worth the material expense.
Sukhee is hardly as youthful as some of the other films of its ilk. It also pretends to be self-aware, to the extent that it jokes about the genre it is set in. “Ye women empowerment ke naam pe kitni filmein bnayenge log,” a man says at one point, to which another suggests the alternative of something belonging to the masculine variety, named ‘Policeman ka badla’. This self-awareness, however, also gives away the self-congratulatory tone that the film encrusts with excessive mindfulness. It bursts out in moments, exposing a genre flaw that won’t go away anytime soon. But for all these imperfections, and a familiarly glassy approach to accruing agency, Sukhee is every bit as life-affirming and accessible, as a film around an unplumbed subject could be.
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