Filmi Geek

Manoranjan (1974)

मनोरंजन

Dir. Shammi Kapoor

I was just thinking that it had been a while since I watched an instant favorite - one of those movies that I know on first watch will be one I return to again and again, one that I gush about in a breathless review.  Manoranjan, it turns out, is one of those movies.  It is not original; it is a very closely wrought remake of Irma La Douce, that wonderful confection with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.  But it is nevertheless funny, charming, and sweet - not to mention bold and convention-smashing and maybe even a little subversive.  And it is made with a sophisticated and elevating attention to craft.  It is unfortunate that the studios of Bombay were for so long (and to a lesser extent, continue to be) in the habit of shamelessly copying the films of other nations without crediting them.  But taking that practice as a given, Manoranjan is in every way a worthy successor to Irma La Douce.  

One reason that Manoranjan is so delightful is that Sanjeev Kumar, with his goofy everyman appeal, fits right into the mold Jack Lemmon created for this character.  His performance is packed with physical comedy.  Like Jack Lemmon, he perfects a bug-eyed innocence, a manner both physically speedy and mentally a little slow on the uptake, displayed in cute double-takes and confused stammering.  If you already like Sanjeev Kumar - and I very much do - what he brings to Manoranjan is adorable enough to carry the movie all the way through.  

The character Kumar plays, Ratan, is hopelessly naive and splendidly good-hearted, a green-behind-the-ears police inspector utterly over his head in the world where he finds himself, which is a world of prostitutes and pimps, of shady dealings and matter-of-course bribes.  He quickly loses his bearings there, and his job.   But thus unmoored, he seems to have nowhere else to go, and so he stays.  He falls for Nisha (Zeenat Aman), one of the women who work the hustling beat between the cafe run by Dhoop Chhaon (Shammi Kapoor, chewing the scenery most delightfully) and the Hotel Mauj across the street.  He somewhat accidentally beats up Nisha's pimp Balram (Dev Kumar), and by the code of law that prevails over the civil law in such communities, becomes Nisha's pimp himself.  Ratan is horrified by this new role, though it is also seductive to his underdeveloped ego.  More, he is overcome by a clueless good-guy urge to save Nisha from her life of debauchery.  With some help from Dhoop Chhaon, Ratan adopts the persona of an elderly Nawab who has the means to pay Nisha for weekly visits, well enough that she no longer needs to provide her services to other men. 

Here is where a little mental compromise is required to enjoy Manoranjan; you do have to buy into its imaginary world of cheerful prostitutes and relatively gentle pimps who behave more like a group of harmless adolescent layabouts than an organized crime syndicate;  Balram is a brute but he also loves Nisha, and the other pimps, like the goofy Tingoo (Paintal), are chummy and comical.  The avuncular Dhoop Chhaon, serving up snacks and drinks at his bar, is the adult supervision that keeps the group's internecine conflicts under control, so that apart from the dark cloud of Balram's jealousy, there is nothing sinister in the operation at all, just laughs and fun and oh yeah, women selling their bodies and giving the proceeds to men to drink and gamble away.  It is a little uncomfortable for sure to accept this sanitized version of the sex trade and trot along as the story unfolds from the premise of it. 

 
Sheru gets tough; and, for a brief moment in a song, we get Zeenat and the other women in Nawab-drag.

And yet there is enough sophistication even in the Disneyfied atmosphere of Dhoop Chhaon's bar to hint at less sparkly truths that lie beneath the jaunty surface.  Irma La Douce had this too, and  Manoranjan preserves it faithfully, without losing the comedy's critical edge.  When "Sheru" (as Nisha incongruously nicknames Ratan) offers to marry Nisha, and support her so she no longer needs to have sex for money, Nisha retorts sharply that there is no honor in being supported by a man, that her pride requires that she work and give him a comfortable life.  What good is a woman who cannot provide for her man, she asks, in a funny and subversive twist on the societal norm that hangs masculine self-worth on the ability to financially support his wife.    In Nisha's world, gender norms are skewed, but perhaps the asburdity of Nisha's notion reflects absurdity of the corresponding notion in our world.  

There is an undercurrent of sadness, too, in Zeenat's performance of Nisha, that also casts shadows on the shiny happy veneer of Manoranjan's jovial family of pimps and prostitutes.   This, too, is borrowed from the original, from the genius of Shirley MacLaine in keeping her eyes sad while her lips are smiling, keeping wryness in her voice even when her words are relentlessly cheerful.  I will not claim that Zeenat's work rises to quite that level, but it is credit to Shammi Kapoor's direction that this nuance is, to a certain degree, detectable in Manoranjan.  Nisha has never been treated truly generously by a man, and to her surprise, Ratan's tender deference to her reaches a part of her that had of necessity been closed off by the life she was born into and lived.  This is touchingly conveyed in one of the film's wonderful songs, later in the movie, "Chori chori solah singar karungi," where Nisha enjoys a midnight shower while singing of the first true happiness she has enjoyed in the entire movie, notwithstanding lots of smiles and laughter.  

 
Fan service!

The subversion continues as Manoranjan hews faithfully to Irma La Douce's story to the end.   Early on,  Manoranjan maintains plausible deniability about whether sex happens between Nisha and Ratan, and at first when Ratan comes to her as the Nawab, he is careful to keep their meetings chaste.  Eventually, though, it is irrefutably clear that Ratan (as Nawab) succumbs to Nisha's seduction.  It is noteworthy that Nisha is the sexual aggressor throughout her relationship with Ratan, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.  (Even when Ratan tries to take on the aggressor's role, in a moment of anger, he cannot bring himself to go through with it.)  True, Nisha is a prostitute; perhaps a Hindi film of the 70s could not have given a woman sexual autonomy without first relegating her to a demeaned, outsider category.  Still, while Nisha lives a life normally assigned to vamps played by Helen and Aruna Irani and Bindu, she remains the heroine, sympathetic, the one true love of the seedha-saadha bhola-bhala hero.   

There is so much more that I love about Manoranjan. It features a sparkling RD Burman soundtrack; the songs and their picturizations both are tons of fun.  From a jaunt early in the movie where Nisha's sorority of prostitutes bats poor Ratan around for sport, to the brilliantly conceived dream sequence of "Aaya hoon main tujhko le jaaunga," each song is fun and playful, and even enhances the story.  In "Aaya hoon main," Ratan dreams himself in competition with the Nawab, rendering in dazzling color and hilariously elaborate sets the conundrum he has created for himself with his ruse.  

 

An enormous bubble bath with a slide; a 50-foot guitar on which the couple dances flamenco.

There is quick verbal humor too, some borrowed from Irma La Douce, and some fresh and lending a more organic touch.  Like his original counterpart, Moustache, Dhoop Chhaon claims in a set of running jokes to have had a vast array of prior careers, from sitting on the Supreme Court in Lahore to being a union organizer to being a commodities trader, and every time he mentions one of these in conversation, he follows with "magar yeh kissa, phir kabhi (but that's a story for another time)." When Ratan adopts the disguise of the Nawab, Dhoop Chhaon cringes at his awful Urdu - an in-joke multiplied by the excellent, studied diction for which Sanjeev Kumar is famous.(*)  Ultimately, Manoranjan satisfies on every level - true to its title, it is charming, naughty, bold, a little bit thought-provoking, and a whole lot of fun. 

 

(*) There is another in-joke around this that I need some help with.  As the Nawab paces the street murmuring his practiced pronunciation of "shabba khair," the background music takes on the melody of the song of that name from Itihaas - still some 13 years in the future at the time of Manoranjan.  Any theories what's going on here?  RD Burman already had the melody in mind but hadn't had a chance to use it?  Could the song have been written for Manoranjan but cut? 

The Lunchbox (2013)

डब्बा

Dir. Ritesh Batra

(A lot has been written about this film, which finally found its way into arthouse cinemas in the US after its successful run on the festival circuit and limited release in India last year. For that reason, I've allowed more spoilers than usual in what I've written below.  If you don't want to know how the film ends, don't read this review until after you've seen it.  For a most thoughtful and thorough discussion of the movie's themes and narrative metaphors that doesn't explicitly give away the ending, read what Beth had to say about it.)

A chance encounter can change a life.  I know someone who married a woman he met on an airplane, in the kismet of arbitrary travel plans and random seat assignments.  We are all of us ruled by stochastic interactions, the interplay of chance, the haphazard intersection of our paths through spacetime with the distinct paths of others.  

The Lunchbox (Dabba) is a tale of a one-in-a-million encounter and the people it alters:  The dabba delivery system of Bombay, so legendarily flawless, makes a mistake, delivers one dabba to one wrong recipient, and connects two lonely people.  There is magic in this, just as there seems to be magic in the meeting of one's life partner on a cross-country flight. It is magical that the error links an anxious, unappreciated homemaker, Ila (Nimrat Kaur) with a curmudgeonly, depressed widower, Saajan (Irrfan Khan).  If Ila's dabba had mistakenly gone to a clueless young professional just like her husband, or if Saajan had accidentally received a dabba from some other restaurant than the one he had always ordered from, there would be no story.  The hand of fate carefully guides Ila's dabba so that Saajan and Ila can find each other across space, and also for our benefit, so we have a movie to watch. That is kismet.

The Lunchbox acknowledges the magic in this setup, by hinting at other metaphysical connections between Saajan and Ila.  Twice during the film, when Ila is at home listening to film songs drifting down from her neighbor's apartment, Saajan, riding the Bombay local, hears boys singing the same songs.  At another point, Ila and Saajan are shown each batting a fly away at the precise same moment, on opposite sides of the city.  And so it the right choice, in the end, for The Lunchbox to remain ambiguous about where Ila and Saajan's connection takes them, because anything concrete would have pierced the veil of that magic. 

After the movie, a woman stopped me in the restroom and asked, "Do you think they went to Bhutan together?  I do."  Likely a significant fraction of the audience was rooting for that outcome.  But showing it would have required facing a lot of messy realities that would break The Lunchbox's gentle spell.  When Ila and Saajan finally meet, are they attracted to one another?  Is it the same kind of attraction on both sides?  Will Ila actually leave her husband on the spot?  What about their daughter?  And just how much older is Saajan than Ila, anyhow?  The Lunchbox is right not to address these questions, to remain in its magical space where accidents of fate can bind strangers together on their journey around the sun without regard to bare, troublesome practicalities. 

Instead of such muddying complications, The Lunchbox dwells beautifully on human connections.  The dour Saajan acquires not only the delicious meals and thoughtful letters of Ila, but also the friendship of his optimistic puppy-dog of an assistant, Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, in a performance that bounces like a super-ball off Irrfan Khan's morose tension).  This friendship grows so touchingly and organically that it is a more satisfying relationship than the nominally central one between Saajan and Ila.  After all, it is more real; unlike an epistolary relationship, the literal, physical closeness of Shaikh and Saajan leaves no space for fantasy.  Shaikh's presence is real, irritating, inconvenient - he looks too closely over Saajan's shoulder, juts his head into Saajan's personal space, helps himself to Saajan's lunch - and their friendship grows out of this rocky soil anyhow.   The messy realities are dispatched before the two men become close.  When Saajan tells Shaikh he has a girlfriend named Ila, the feeling is sweet but also a bit pathetic; the question whether Ila thinks of him as her boyfriend hangs in the air between screen and audience.  If Saajan were to tell Ila of a best friend named Shaikh, however, there is no such pestering doubt.  And Saajan's first smile of the movie comes while talking to Shaikh, not while reading Ila's letters.

But Saajan is changed by both relationships.  For one, he is made to feel young, then old, then young again, until perhaps he comes to realize that he is neither, or both, or that it doesn't really matter, so long as he has not given up human connections entirely.  The Lunchbox provides sweet and delicate window into the ways people touch each other, without too much focus on the troublesome details, or how touch also sometimes means hurt.  It's a lovely fantasy world to spend a little time in, and you get to choose your own ending.

Queen (2014)

Dir. Vikas Behl

About a third of the way through Queen, its titular character Rani (Kangana Ranaut) is assaulted in a Parisian alleyway by a would-be purse-snatcher.  Rani hangs on to her purse with ferocious tenacity, twisting its handles around her wrists, falling to the ground, kicking at her assailant to keep him at bay. The struggle lasts a long minute, before a voice from a neighboring building scares the mugger off, and Rani sits up, gasping, to process what has just happened to her.  This scene is a microcosm of Queen, which is Rani's wonderful bildungsroman.  With each challenge Rani faces, each new experience, she discovers an internal reserve of strength that she had no idea was there.  And watching her discover it is an absolute delight.

As Queen opens, Rani is a provincial and proper girl, about to marry.  Rani seems to view her marriage as a culmination, an event that provides definition to her life thus far.  Suddenly spurned by her fiance, Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), Rani takes her honeymoon anyway, without him, and in classical fashion has a journey of self-discovery in Paris and Amsterdam.  By the end of the film, Rani has a fully developed sense of self and of adventure, and the film executes this arc flawlessly.  There is no one moment or event at which Rani breaks free, no abrupt discontinuity between seedhi-saadhi ladki and broad-minded free spirit.  Challenge by challenge, friend by friend, experience by experience, Rani smoothly becomes more and more alive.  This transition is no mean feat for a film to manage; it is a subtle development of strength, and difficult to portray.  Queen, and Kangana Ranaut, achieve it perfectly.

There's a lot of talk - and not just with respect to Hindi films - about "strong" female characters.  I like strong female characters as much as anyone - they make for good stories.  But there are different kinds of strength.  Rani comes from a Delhi Punjabi family, complete with (as my friend Karan Bali so excellently observed) the chubby little brother and bindaas grandmother who are becoming standard issue for such filmi families.  But Rani is not loud and headstrong, like Parineeti Chopra in Ladies v. Ricky Bahl, or on a confidently planned path to independent success like Anushka Sharma in Band baaja baaraat.  She is much more like Sridevi in English Vinglish, an understated woman of powerful untapped potential who at first believes she can be content with her small world and her small role in it.   Queen is English Vinglish at a different time of life, and the difference matters:  Queen says you do not have to pay decades of dues on the straight and narrow before earning the right to find out who you really are.

At the heart of Rani's strength is a magnificent gameness, rendered by both the script and by Ranaut with a perfect balance of boldness and caution.  As Rani is confronted by new experiences - the permissiveness of French culture, the pounding beat of a night club, the prospect of three male roommates in an Amsterdam hostel - she greets each one first with fear and discomfort, and then relaxes into the flow, resolving at least to accept the new world order as it shifts and changes around her.  I love this about Rani.  She is not a wild child or a rebel - she is simply open to new ideas as they come to her.  Kangana Ranaut delivers this with perfect pitch, her wide open face registering shades of shock, trepidation, and finally a plucky sort of surrender to whatever strange new experience is thrown at her.  It is a treat to take these adventures with her.  And while the film flirts with a number of cliches - the sheltered Indian girl traveling abroad, the moral laxity of foreigners, the strangeness of foreign cultures and foreign food, the first taste of alcohol - with each of these elements Queen leads you down the garden path, so that just when you fear it is about to lose its magical touch and invoke some hackneyed trope, it veers sharply, comically, and delightfully around the obstacle.  It uses these elements well, to tell a piece of Rani's story, rather than leaning on them lamely, to make weak fun of foreigners.

One mark of Rani's awakening is that when she meets Vijay toward the end of her adventure, it is on her terms, at the place and time of her choosing.  At the beginning, when Vijay calls off the marriage, he claims that being abroad has changed him, while she has remained the same. And at that point, you might be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt - perhaps he genuinely believes the relationship would not work.  As the details of their courtship are doled out in flashback, though, it becomes clear that for all his talk, Vijay is small-minded and a bit of jerk, without much sense of (or interest in) any way that Rani's desires might be independent of his own.  (Rajkummar Rao is getting quite good at playing this kind of character, the boy who could be a good man if only he made one or two catastrophic choices a little differently. See Love, Sex aur Dhokha for a more gruesome example.) By the end of the film, it is obvious that Vijay has it exactly backward; Rani is the one who has changed and grown, while Vijay (who boasts that he understands foreigners as a class, but fails to perceive them as people) is the same provincial, egotistical boy he always was.  To Queen's credit, it does not bash us over the head with this contrast, but rather lets it hang in the empty air around Vijay when Rani ditches him to go to a concert with her international friends.

Some aspects of Rani's arc are rendered in delightful details.  In the moments after Vijay calls off the marriage, Rani steps out of the Cafe Coffee Day shop he has chosen for a breakup venue, and we see her, reacting with shock to what he has said, framed by the cafe's awning with its apt slogan, "A lot can happen over a cup of coffee."  In another superb moment, during a song set in Paris, Rani reacts with some shock to the sight of couples openly kissing all over the city. There is a break in a song, a silent beat, in which Rani's face registers a charming discomfort; then, at the very moment her face changes to a bemused sort of resignation, the song picks up again, in a new key.  In that instant, Queen encapsulates the irrevocable changes happening incrementally, moment by moment, in Rani's understanding of her life.  Later, toward the end of her film, her Amsterdam roommates find on YouTube a video of the song that opened the film: Rani dancing with her family during the celebrations of what was to be her wedding.  Rani watches with a mixture of puzzlement and horror.  One has the palpable sense that she is looking at herself in another lifetime. 

I do not feel my words, plentiful as they are, do justice to the pure pleasure of Queen, of Rani's journey and adventure and strength and beauty, the subtlety and craft with which this story is told, how truly remarkable and lovely this movie is from start to finish.  With all this, a marvelous and engaging performance by Kangana Ranaut (who transforms into Juhi Chawla when she smiles) and yet another brilliant soundtrack by Amit Trivedi, why are you even sitting here reading this?  Just go watch Queen.  You can thank me later.

Ishqiya (2010)

इश्क़िया

Dir. Abhishek Chaubey

Any movie that opens with a languid, warmly-lit amble along the rolling curves of the supine body of Vidya Balan is a movie I am going to like.  A lot.  When I mentioned I was watching Ishqiya, several friends expressed surprise that I hadn't yet seen it.  ("That is basically inconceivable," said Beth.)  For what it's worth, I do have an excuse. I was a late boarder on the Vidya train; I did not realize that this mind-stompingly gorgeous woman was the love of my life until halfway through my first viewing of Kahaani just about a year ago.  I have been playing catch-up - but pacing myself - ever since. Having said that, in Ishqiya, Vidya is about as ohmigodHOT as a woman can be without violating several multilateral treaties.

Indeed, I don't know how to write about this movie without dissolving into a gelatinous heap of gush.  And not just for Vidya, either.  Ishqiya's director, Abhishek Chaubey, studied at the knee of Vishal Bhardwaj (who produced the film), and Bhardwaj's masterful influence is all over this striking, wry movie. Its tone is reminiscent of the most dry and funny vignettes of 7 Khoon Maaf.  Its narrative is less rangy than that of 7 Khoon Maaf, however, and therefore less lurchy.  Two of the dumbest criminals ever to cross a filmi screen, Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and his nephew Babban (Arshad Warsi), are in flight from their boss, Mushtaq (Salman Shahid), whom they have cheated out of some 25 lakhs.  The pair takes refuge in the home of Krishna (Vidya Balan), widow of their erstwhile business associate, the smuggler Vidyadhar Verma (Adil Hussain).  Both men fall for the quiet, intense Krishna, who hatches a plan to kidnap a local steel magnate KK Kakkad (Rajesh Sharma) for ransom.  But the kidnapping soon unravels and the men slowly realize that Krishna has manipulated all of them - Khalu, Babban, and even KK - for her own mysterious purposes. 

There is craft in every aspect of this Ishqiya. It is as beautifully shot as any Bhardwaj movie, and in the same warm, enveloping earth tones that can make a a movie as seductive for the eyes as lush caramel is on the tongue.  From the throaty reds of Krishna's sarees, to the damp brown clutter of the interior of her home, to the salted beige landscapes of the Uttar Pradesh countryside, every frame of this movie is almost tactile in its richness.  Bhardwaj's score, as his music usually does, adds texture and character, from the jaunty swagger of "Ibn-e-Batuta" to the sweet lilt of "Dil to bachha hai ji."

The characterizations are meticulously detailed  in both writing and performance. Khalujaan is philosophical and poetic, the brighter bulb of the two thieves, but not by a lot.  As he trims his beard, dyes his hair, dons handsome traditional clothes, and discusses the finer points of evergreen filmi songs with Krishna, Khalu projects the air of a man who does not necessarily want to shed the grit of his criminal life, but who wants to look as though he wants to shed it.  His love for Krishna is a touching mixture of passionate and avuncular; it's not clear exactly what relationship he wants to have with her, but it's clear that it's very loving.  Babban's style is more bombastic; his stupidity displays in rash, testosterone-driven bursts rather than Khalu's intellectual posing.  In one scene, Mushtaq and his men track down the pair when they run into Babban at a brothel in the town near Krishna's village; one has the impression that Mushtaq knows well that the most efficient way to find Babban in any city in the country is always to make a beeline for the nearest brothel. The performances of Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi as these not-so-clever medium-time crooks are pitch perfect, just the right mixture of grit and scene-chewing to be both endearing and eye-rolling.  It's hard not feel sorry for them when it becomes clear just how outclassed they are by Krishna, even when you facepalmed at their ill-considered antics just a few scenes before.

And then there is Vidya Balan, as smoldering, fierce, and sexy in this role as in any other.  (I considered doing this review in the style of my piece on The Dirty Picture - a debate between my analytic intellectual ego and my horny lesbian id - but my id did not have much to say beyond "Guh...."  A superbly executed sex scene had me wistfully craving an alternate universe in which I could be Arshad Warsi.)  But as gorgeous and fierce as Vidya is, there is a great deal of nuance to Krishna; the character is not merely a cartoon femme fatale with an eye for manipulable men.  Krishna begins the film as a loving wife, anxiously imploring Verma to give up the dangerous smuggler's life and turn himself in to the authorities.  Krishna's circumstances and what she has endured - not an inherent vicious streak or a flaw in  her nature - drive her to the bold and violent actions she takes as the film unfolds.  This is evident the first time she overtly betrays Khalu and Babban.  The men have gotten into a fight - mostly over her - while she waits in their getaway car with their kidnapping prey, the dazed and bound KK, lolling in the backseat.  Krishna hesitates nervously before taking the wheel and speeding away with their prize.  This is a woman with a plan, but not a woman so cold as to have no need to muster her courage before executing.  It is just one of a myriad finely wrought details that make Krishna - like everything else about Ishqiya - thoroughly compelling.

English Vinglish (2012)

Dir. Gauri Shinde

As the opening date of Sridevi's first movie in 15 years approached, I began to notice a rising pitch of excitement and anticipation among desi women of a certain age. So many of my friends and acquaintances in their 30s and 40s were beside themselves, unable to contain their delight at the prospect of their childhood favorite returning to the big screen.  An outstanding article by Supriya Nair captures what Sridevi means to that generation. (It also includes a fascinating discussion of Sri's masterful song from Mr. India, "Hawa hawai.")  

As an outsider, I  have no childhood memories of Sridevi to draw on to fuel my anticipation - only an admiration for Sridevi's obvious gifts, which to my eye are so often far out of proportion to the horrible movies she graced with them.  Nair's nostalgic exploration traverses the many faces of Sridevi - her comedic radiance, her raw ingenuous vulnerability - that captivated and confused a generation trying to find its voice in a nation transitioning to modernity.  Reading this piece helps me understand why the women I know awaited the new movie, Gauri Shinde's English Vinglish, with such thrill and expectation.  Seeing the movie made real for me all the praise I'd ever heard for Sridevi.  She is a gifted, empathetic, and thoroughly charming performer. And English Vinglish is a beautiful, lovable movie, fully worthy of her gifts.

Sridevi's Shashi Godbole is an overworked, underappreciated Pune housewife who, like the classmates Supriya Nair remembers from her school days, also finds her voice in a confusing world.  Shashi's family unthinkingly undermines everything she does from which she might derive a sense of pride or accomplishment.  Shashi's husband, Satish (Adil Hussain), has no problem with modern women in his working life, but it's clear that he prefers a submissive galley slave at home.  He tells her in so many words that he only bothers coming home from work because of her cooking.  More than that, he belittles and discourages her from pursuing her independent business, hand-crafting and delivering laddoos.   Shashi's preteen daughter sasses her, as young girls will do to their mothers - but the girl's embarrassment has an edge that gets under Shashi's skin.  She is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother's backwardness - especially her inability to speak English.  When a business meeting keeps Satish from a parent-teacher conference, Shashi attends in his place, to the girl's utter mortification.  Shashi is elated after a charmingly successful discussion with one of the teachers, but her daughter destroys that elation in a single verbal stroke, leaving Shashi bruised and uncertain.

One has the sense - thanks both to taut scripting and Sridevi's masterful performance - of a woman bursting with intelligence and creativity, a woman who harbors a flickering sense of her own power, as yet unable to find a suitable outlet for it.  When preparations for a family wedding land her in New York with a month to herself, Shashi sees an opportunity and leaps at it, signing up for an intensive English course.  What follows is a delightful and touching adventure, as Shashi discovers the capacious strength and courage that has been in her all along, and presses these into service of her pursuit of respect for everything she is and can do. 

I crave stories like this, stories about mature women finding ways to express themselves independently, tapping into strengths they may not even have been aware they had.  And in this, English Vinglish delivers beautifully.  This is Sridevi's movie from beginning to end, and she is simply outstanding.  She is in every scene, and her famously huge eyes fill the screen with emotion and sensitivity.  The physicality of Sridevi's performances is legendary, but her work in English Vinglish is entirely different in character from her comedic physicality, on display in iconic pieces like "Hawa hawai," with their nods to the tradition of Lucille Ball.  Here, rather than comedy, Sridevi's body language conveys broadly ranging emotion.  Beaming with delight after her conference with her daughter's teacher, Shashi visibly deflates under the girl's mocking words.  In a later scene, Shashi talks with her sister about the latter's great success  as a businesswoman in New York.  While her sister sits straight-backed and confident, Shashi slumps in her chair.  Later, though, Shashi's posture and stride grow more sure as she navigates the subways and streets of the city daily on her way to class.  How satisfying to see her strut down a crowded avenue wearing a trenchcoat over her gorgeous Sabyaschi sari, clutching a cup of coffee.

Another delight of English Vinglish is that it doesn't take a romance for Shashi to find her confidence. There is a romantic element - one of Shashi's classmates, the dashing Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou), falls for her quite hard - but there is little sign that Shashi returns his feelings beyond friendship.  Indeed, Shashi seems to find Laurent's romantic interest somewhat frustrating and beside the point.  Instead of being inspired by male attention, Shashi is inspired by recognition and respect.  When her English teacher (Cory Hibbs) tells her that her laddoo business qualifies her as an "entrepreneur," Shashi glows with wonder as she tries the word on for size - and walks unnoticingly right past the smitten Laurent.

Recognition and respect is exactly what Shashi does not get from her husband Satish, who is a first-class jackass.  Even when attempting to pay her a compliment, he belittles her - as when he exclaims "My wife was born to make laddoos!" after dismissing the business earlier in the film as a frivolous waste of time.  But here the script and Shinde's direction again achieve flawless balance - Satish remains just this side of mustache-twirling cartoonishness, even as his maddeningly demeaning comments make one want to punch him in the head.  The disrespect from her family makes Shashi's climactic speech about the vitality of support for one's family - delivered, of course, in slow but increasingly confident English - all the more satisfying.

If I have to lodge even one complaint about English Vinglish, it's that the movie shortchanges Sridevi's wonderful dancing.  She does dance a little in the film's final song, and while her bashfulness at doing so is entirely consistent with Shashi's character, it would have been nice if she cut loose for more than a few seconds once that tentativeness is established and overcome.  But this is such a small nit to pick about a movie that is a true delight.  The journey that Sridevi takes us on with Shashi, learning to flex her strength and her voice, is beautiful.  It's one that I am sure I will revisit again and again - an instant favorite.