Angry Indian Goddesses

This movie is like the ‘Ladies Special’ train that sets off from Churchgate station in Mumbai every evening, a relatively uncrowded service reserved entirely for women and the envy of male commuters. It is about a girl called Frieda Da Silva (Sarah-Jane Dias) who has invited all her girl friends for a get-together at her family home in Goa. Once they turn up, one of them with a six-year-old daughter, Frieda declares that she’ll be getting married and that this is a kind of bachelorette retreat before the big day.

With the girls all set to let their hair down, delightfully satiric and erotic scenes follow. Apparently, there is just one man on the immediate horizon, a drool-worthy guy who makes his presence felt while washing his Ambassador car. The girls leer at him (Anuj Choudhry) unabashedly and fantasise his splashing each one of them with his hose as lovingly as he does his car.

In another scene, Joanna (Amrit Maghera), a girl from London with aspirations to Hindi film stardom, practices her Bollywood dance moves in underclothes under a shower. She is joined in a duet by the maid of the house, Laxmi (Rajshri Deshpande), who accompanies her with a hot Lavani-style dance. These are hugely entertaining vignettes that give a twist to male fantasy clichés—in a nice, girly and self-deprecatory manner.

But All About Eve (1950), it is not. That classic Hollywood film looked at the nature of women in a group and portrayed how individual ambition was much stronger than loyalty to gender or even ethics. Here, it is the other way around. The film ends with the rather didactic point that all women (and men too) must own up to a collective social responsibility in preventing crimes against women. This is an idyllic perspective that is foisted upon the movie.

But other than that, the movie is worth a watch.

Angry Indian GoddessesAnushka ManchandaPan NalinTannishtha Chatterjee