A lipstick and a burkha aren't an unlikely combination, but for Shireen and three other women in the film, they form the metaphors of colourful dreams and desires that are veiled but can't be suppressed.
But the film falls short of being genre-defining.
Perhaps to offset the mess that they make of their lives, the lineup of women is a little too tidy and symmetrical.
A new film, Lipstick Under My Burkha directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, has finally been released after a five-month delay caused by the Central Board of Film Certification's refusal to give it a certificate. Ratna Parekh Shah as UshaParmar played a character of old women who runs sweet shop and gets attracted to her young swimming trainer. It all adds up with a tantalizing cohesiveness, leaving nothing to chance.
"I'm very excited to see how people in India engage with the film", Alankrita Shrivastava said in an interview to a local newspaper. Avinash Das, director of Anarkali of Araah, another women-centred film released earlier this year, agrees. This is Bhopal at its most basic strata.
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A film that was nearly banned for being "lady-oriented" and depicting excessive sexuality was released in theaters across India on Friday, following a protracted battle with the country's film certification board. They are not allowed to show in sensitivity. As the 55 year old whoreads out pages from an erotic novel and engages in phone sex in her bathroom, she is simply outstanding.
Describing the controversy around the film as "the result of Indian hypocrisy", engineering student Akansha Agnihotri, 21, said she liked the movie. She also said women's sexuality has always been repressed because it makes men uncomfortable, but she wanted to make a film that addressed each of those issues and gave women a voice. Whenever he returns back to the country, she is forced to have passionless sex.
Ratna Pathak Shah is buaji for everyone who stays in her Hawai Manzil, including the protagonists. While the actress is habitually competent here I find Konkona relying excessively on stock expressions of wistful yearning.
And I thought this line of spousal thought went out of fashion with Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. For Borthakur's character Rehana Abidi, it was her conservative parents who wanted her to kill her dreams and be bound by a burkha. Shireen Aslam played by Konkona Sen Sharma a sales girl who does a job without her husband as she is just a mere sex object for her husband who has scant regard for her feelings. Again this sequence has a direct echo in Parched where Tannishtha Chatterjee sponges the abused wife Radhika Apte's breasts.
She sees the garment, used as a metaphor for the boundaries within which many Indian women live, as useful for shoplifting cosmetics - but removes it in a college washroom. Nonetheless this is a vital and in many ways, great film more remarkable for what it doesn't say about women who long for sexual salvation than what it does say, so explicitly.
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