Lipstick Under My Burkha: Powerful movie of the week
Cast: Konkona Sen Sharma, Ratna Pathak, Aahana Kumra, Plabita Borthakur, Sushant Singh, Vaibhav Tatwawaadi
Rated: 8/10
Lipstick Under My Burqa is meant to raise a stink and it does so with a starkness that may make you feel embarrassed but the reality it throws at you draws you in with equal force into the life and times of four middle class, small town women, two of them suffering life from behind the proverbial burqa.
The burqa — and the lipstick — here are symbols of oppression that most women — of any community — go through in their daily lives. They suffer it, they try to fight it in their own little ways (that’s where the lipstick comes in) and, quite sadly, they learn to live with it in the long run.
Young director Alankrita Shrivastava, a petite firehouse of somewhat unassuming feminism herself, made this everyday reality into a conscience-shaking film in which the main prop is the near-perfect fit of histrionics into the casting and story-line.
It is a fearless film which does not hesitate in raising your eyebrow with as much force as it raises your hackles, a fact embodied by the hyper stupid Censor Board which tried its best to relegate the movie to the film festival circuit.
The Censor Board has thrown the scissors at much less. This one was bound to make Pahlaj Nihalani hopping mad and it did. But the film and its unit fought back and here they are to finger your sense of discomfort and compel you to acknowledge that womanhood was, is and will continue to sit uncomfortably on a male dominant society.
Lipstick Under My Burqa comes with a high libido, not so of the men but of the women it pivots around. There is everything here that society does not want to have in its women — there is middle-age masturbation and phone sex by a buaji, there is anal sex in a crowded, dingy ante-room between a young bride and her lover who will not be her husband, there is a woman who embodies the art kind of oppression posing nude for painters, there is repeated marital rape and there is casual sex too.
All this makes one squirm but Alankrita does well to never allow you to get away from these carnal but womanly needs which are seldom allowed to get between the sheets in popular imagination. Sex continues to be all male — and mostly a sufferance for women, women like the one Konkona Sen Sharma plays with such élan in this film.
As a Muslim woman, she secretly fuels her need to work as a sales girl and be independent even though she braves her lustful and chauvinistic husband’s bedroom assaults with open eyes every night. Marital rape is not even acknowledged in Indian law and to see it happening with such regularity to Konkona in the film is shell-shocking.
Then there is a young girl next door who lives the oppression of her conservative Muslim parents by indulging in Kyle Minogue, music, pro-jeans protests, beer-drinking and sleeping with a young drummer by shedding the burqa the moment she sheds her house in the mornings.
To avoid being labelled blasphemous, Alankrita decided to be politically correct by mixing up Hindu and Muslim women in her showcase. Ratna Pathak Shah as the middle aged woman indulging in phone sex through the exploits of Rosy in a pulp fiction novel takes your heart with her helpless yearnings and what comes out of it.
The film is a powerful, focussed and impactful must-see learning lesson for all and sundry. It is a film to be proud of, mostly because it shows up our needless embarrassments and in-built regressions as never before. No wonder biggies like Prakash Jha decided to be its producer and Ekta Kapoor its unabashed distributor.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 23 July, 2017