With a movie set in rural India in 2001, Mumbai Diaries’ Kiran Rao directs a story of two newlywed {couples} taking a protracted journey by prepare to arrange their new properties in numerous villages. Altering trains by night time in a rush, one groom grabs the hand of the mistaken girl and hustles her off the prepare with him. The error isn’t found till they attain his village. Anybody who sits right down to this mild comedy-drama on the idea that its wife-swapping premise feels like a saucy throwback to the Confessions of a Window Cleaner-style romps of Britcoms previous is in for a tragic disappointment, however they’ll discover themselves entertained however.
It’s not fairly as implausible as it would sound: each marriages are organized, so the {couples} aren’t accustomed to one another, and the brides are each veiled in strikingly related pink marital clothes. Plus, it’s late, it’s darkish, it’s crowded … look, you’re simply going to must go together with it. There’s even an argument that the classical implausibility of the mix-up helps situate the story within the realm of Shakespearean comedies, the place individuals are consistently passing themselves off as long-lost gender-switching brothers and sisters. The secondary solid of characters underline this: Chhaya Kadam because the no-nonsense station tea store proprietor and Ravi Kishan as a grimacing police officer really feel like precisely the sorts of character roles you’ll be able to think about Miriam Margolyes or Simon Russell Beale getting their tooth into in an English-language model.
Then again, there’s a lot about Laapataa Women that feels culturally particular, so maybe an English language model could be a horrible concept. The script, by Sneha Desai, Biplab Goswami and Divyanidhi Sharma, is alive to the social nuances for ladies on this explicit context – Pratibha Ranta and Nitanshi Goel play characters who really feel somewhat in another way about their marriages, and who land in very completely different milieu because of the mix-up. The movie is neither absolutely condemnatory of organized marriages, nor starry-eyed in regards to the follow, permitting for a delicate probing of views.
