Shakuntala Devi Analysis

Shakuntala Devi

Directed by: Anu Menon

Starring: Vidya Balan, Sanya Malhotra, Amit Sadh

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Shakuntala Devi falls under the films which explore themes like 'the obsessed artist', like Whiplash, Black Swan and Sankarabharanam - it explores the basic conflict of - how will you balance your family life with the kind of obsession you have for your work. I personally love these films because I myself have this internal conflict a lot of times. For the setting of the film, the pressure of family life adds up because she is a woman and in India, people put mothers on a pedestal and don't let them be women and have an agency of their own - but Shakuntala Devi was an eccentric and naturally, a narcissistic woman and she wouldn't let others take control of her life. There couldn't have been a better conflict and better themes than this, to explore her film and if they also had real incidents to latch on to for material, then why wasn't the film as brilliant as it sounds on an idea level?

It's because they put activism into the lines of characters - I understand where this is coming from, in an effort to bring social awareness, but I'm not going to root for films where the characters blurt out activist dialogue. They could instead do the same through the actions of the characters, best example is Mahanati. They inspire us with the 'goodness' of Savithri; but they don't do that by making her say lines like 'we should donate our wealth to all' and instead they show us how even in bad situations, she chose humanity and donated. In this film, we see her actions as well where she chooses Math over her family and when she faces the conflict, she prefers her daughter and so - but still we hear lines like 'mai bada aadmi nahi badi aurat banungi' - she is great irrespective of her gender. By bringing the women empowerment angle, you are saying that she is great because she is what she is, in spite of she being a woman - why would you imply that? 

Yes, later she had to face the conflict of, people telling her that she's not being motherly enough - individualism vs family is a brilliant theme that they brought in, but they could've done this without the glasses of women empowerment too. It's like repeatedly saying the obvious, how would you feel if a character says, 'Honesty is the best policy, do good, respect elders'? This film doesn't overdo this, this film is still nuanced - all of this is in response to a wave of films doing this. I'm no one to say how someone's artistic voice should be, but I just want to encourage people to look back at what kind of films inspired them to pursue cinema in the first place.

Having said that, I loved Vidya Balan's performance and also what Sanya Malhotra did - but the chemistry somehow didn't work for me in the ending scenes. The scene of pretending to be normal with the in-laws was hilarious and the normal vs amazing debate is also interesting, because somehow close people don't empathise with such characters and all they worry about, is their eccentricity. The recreation of that old milieu in the childhood scenes and the London scenes - they reminded me of Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory which used a different frame rate (similar to Charlie Chaplin's films) to convey a sense of time.