‘Bandkhor’: A mixed bag

Cast: Mrinal Kulkarni, Chhaya Kadam, Priydarshini Indalkar, Siddharth Bodke, Mangesh Desai

The problem is not with the women, who are all played with gusto, if not always with the dignity that the characters demand. It’s with their representational purpose. Priyadarshini Indalkar’s Meera is shown to be hot-headed, temperamental, rude and abrasive. She is a rather obsolete portrait of feminism, trolling with the tropes, so to speak. She also, gulp gasp, smokes at times at the most inopportune time, like when her grandfather (another roguish male character) is being cremated.

Why would she do this? Meera is a show-off post-feminism caricature who is saddled with multiple tropes. Before the film is over, she will dump her (repentant) boyfriend, decide to keep her (illegitimate) baby and put her perversely patriarchal uncle Sada (Mangesh Desai) in his place.

In comparison, the dead patriarch’s mistress Sharda (Mrinal Kulkarni) is a weak character, weakly portrayed. A lot of what appears to be rebellious here (“women can manage perfectly without men”) is at heart plainly a chest-thumping, pseudo-feminist version of bra-burning, with episode after episode meant to show the men in the audience what women can do when they set their heart to it.

And yet — here’s the thing — ‘Bandkhor’ is not a loss-making investment for the audience. It has a certain sparkle in its gait, and a delectable wit in the way the women defeat despair by rallying around each other.

Though the ending, when the protagonist rejects her repentant boyfriend’s marriage offer, seemed too much of Mahesh Bhatt’s ‘Arth’, I still felt like applauding the film’s spunky portrait of women who battle male tyranny with lots of antidotal energy and playful background music.

The spirit of sisterly empathy runs through the veins of Manjrekar’s film. His vision of women’s emancipation may be outdated, but there is yet a primeval joy in watching these women negotiating male dominance through a slippery turf.