The real winner of Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies appears out of the blue without much fanfare. “Should I say something in full English?” Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastav) asks Phool (Nitanshi Goel), a day after they’ve got married. Hearing his broken English, one can almost guess what the line is going to be. “I love you,” he says in a single breath, following a second’s worth of awkwardness between the couple as the words hang in the air, after which Phool starts giggling. Deepak sighs with relief and Ram Sampath’s Sajni (sung by Arijit Singh) starts playing. A frequent collaborator with Aamir Khan productions (co-producing with Jio Studios and Kiran Rao’s Kindling Pictures) since Peepli Live (2007), Sampath’s song emerges as an unlikely hero as it accentuates the longing in the film, without ever intruding and stating its presence. The song showcases its composer at his strongest; Sampath knows how to keep things simple.
A man going to a police station to file a report after ‘misplacing’ his wife – sounds like the first line of a WhatsApp joke. In her sophomore effort, Rao builds a gentle, hopeful film around this ‘quirky’ premise. It was probably just a coincidence that the first name I saw while exiting the theatre after watching Rao’s film was Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s. A quote attributed to him reads something like: “I never let the sugar in my films overpower the medicine.” It’s a quote that sits well with Rao’s film, given how its feminist stance is conveyed without beating its audiences over their heads. Also, I was reminded of Mukherjee’s Bawarchi (1972) quite a bit while watching Rao’s film.
Like a million others, Deepak and Phool have just gotten married in the state of Nirmal Pradesh. She’s taught to walk with a veil over her head. When she trips on her way to the local bus stand, an elder tells her – “Learn to walk with the ghoonghat, keep your eyes to the ground.” When they enter their designated bogey – two more newly-married couples are already seated there. Almost wearing identical clothes, a newly-minted mother-in-law brags how the suit material for their son is better than Deepak’s. They casually ask him what he got for dowry, before going to brag about how their son got a motorbike and a cellphone from his in-laws.
A still from ‘Laapataa Ladies’.
Reaching his station late in the evening, Deepak wakes up in a daze and tells Phool to hurry and get off the train. But then, all hell breaks loose, when Deepak and his family realise he’s brought home another one of the (almost identically dressed) brides in the bogey. Pushpa (Pratibha Ranta) is nowhere as shy as Phool. When asked about why she followed Deepak without any questions – “I was simply told to follow my husband’s shoes,” she snaps back. Meanwhile, Phool wakes up in a station a few hours down the line and much to her horror, without Deepak around. She can’t seem to remember the name of Deepak’s village, or even the name of the station she boarded from. She decided to stick around there. Deepak approaches a corrupt cop Shyam Manohar for help about his missing wife – a glorious and perpetually pan-chewing Ravi Kishen.
Written by Sneha Desai, based on a novella by Biplab Goswami, Rao’s film is optimistic without being naive, assertive without being loud, and crowd-pleasing without sacrificing integrity for a ‘happy ending’. The two brides are built differently. Pushpa, whose real name turns out to be Jaya, invites the suspicions of Shyam Manohar, who follows her around. Phool, out of her depth at a railway station, befriends a couple of people working at a food stall. But just like characters from an Imtiaz Ali film – just when the two brides lose themselves in this big, bad world, is when they end up finding themselves.
Jaya appears to know a lot about saving crops from insects, also fearlessly asking her mother-in-law (Geeta Agrawal, playing a nameless ‘mother’ character for a fourth time in the last five months) if she can befriend her. Even as she appears to be plotting something, Jaya goes around the house sowing the seeds of a quiet revolution. Phool, who prides herself as a “bhale ghar ki ladki” (from a ‘decent’ family) meets Manju Maai (Chhaya Kadam) who first rebukes her for her ‘decency’ [Phool won’t utter Deepak’s name because it’s not something a dutiful bride does], and then goes on to employ her. Phool earns her first living when Manju Maai shoves some cash in her palm, telling her how the kalaakand (sweet) she made is a big hit.
A still from ‘Laapataa Ladies’.
The tone for Rao’s film is deliberately sitcom-like. There’s a character, who worked as a security guard in Calcutta for over two decades, sleeping with his eyes open, every now and then screaming “jaagte raho”. The gag assumes a lot more heft, when the family members ‘awaken’ to the unfairness women are being subjected to. There’s a fantastic call-back to Manju Maai saying no to Phool’s kalaakand during an earlier scene by saying that she’s never had anything sweet so far. She takes a spoon full of it during the film’s heart-warming climax.
Two of the strongest pillars in the film are also the two male characters – Deepak and Shyam Manohar. Sparsh Srivastav – who broke out with Netflix’s Jamtara – is earnest and haunted as someone who can’t fathom how his closest friends and family are so casual about his missing wife. A drunk friend tells him – why can’t he simply ‘replace’ Phool with Jaya? He almost gets beaten to pulp. Also, Shyam Manohar – a cop who takes piles of currency off his table and puts it in his drawer like it was his second nature – finds his own moral awakening the deeper he gets into Jaya’s case. Kishen – a superb actor when inhabiting a solid script – finds Manohar’s sense of humour and elevates it with his timing.
A still from ‘Laapataa Ladies’.
Laapataa Ladies, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2023, is a shining beacon of arguably the hardest genre of film: the feel-good satire. How does one be assertive with their message without diluting it? How does one keep proceedings as cursory as possible, but still evoke feeling? How does one plot specificity while also keeping it as vague as possible, given how it could be a story that could take place anywhere? Rao and her crew offer a sincere exhibition. Why waste thousands of angry words on male entitlement, when you can turn down their requests for more chutney. When they get the message, offer them a spoon of kalaakand.
