Being holed up at home over the past six months, I have been binging on a lot of online content these days. From watching popular sitcoms to classic movies and falling in love with each character, I’m pretty sure I will be coming out of this quarantine with weaker eyesight. Speaking of new releases, I recently watched the film Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare and made a few observations about the film that I would like to share.
Directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, the film stars Konkana Sen Sharma and Bhumi Pednekar in the lead roles. Actors Vikrant Massey and Amol Parashar, paired opposite them, play key roles in the film. When I watched the trailer of the film, I felt it would be a light-hearted movie, describing the sweet and sour relationship of two sisters. However, I was impressed by how the film depicted various social taboos faced by women in Indian society.
One of the many subjects that were beautifully projected in the film was acceptance. Bhumi Pednekar portrayed the role of a woman who elopes from her hometown to avoid getting married to a man she’d never met. She comes to a city to find independence and gets a job that pays her well. Although her job as a romantic voice operator does pay her well, she often finds herself thinking if she has been doing the right thing, because according to society, ‘women like her should not be doing a job like that.’
Hopelessly romantic, she finds a man and falls in love with him, but ends up getting a heartbreak, which teaches her a lot of lessons. Despite it all, she believes in herself and her ‘job’ and gets back on her feet, because she chose to do it herself. And even when everything else fails, she decides to fight back, this time only stronger.
Konkana Sen Sharma has always been one of my favourite Bollywood actors because of the choices of movie scripts she makes. She’s portrayed a woman with a happy family, two children and a husband. She dreams of buying a luxury flat and wants a lavish lifestyle. She makes her family her priority, often forgetting what she wants from her life.
Although she knows about her husband’s whereabouts, she remains quiet because women are bound to think and put their families over everything else. Later though, she does realise her worth and ends up leaving everything behind her, and finally, feeling lighter.
One of Konkana Sen Sharma’s sons in the film is shown as a transgender person, who prefers playing with dolls instead of cars. At first, she tries to mould him to think and act like a boy, but understands that she cannot change anything about it and accepts him the way he is, which is another important message for parents out there.
Alankrita Shrivastava tends to focus on the sexual desires of a woman and how society moulds to think about them in a certain way. All in all, Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is a must-watch film about unfulfilled desires and dreams of two women. Similar to the film Lipstick Under My Burkha, which also addressed social taboos of the Indian society, this film will make one question the things that happen in one’s surroundings and go unnoticed, since we are taught to think in a certain way.