THELMA AND LOUISE

Two women who go off on a road trip in Texas and after an initial bit of fun, everything goes downhill. Fast!

At every point in this film, even though you’re having fun and are getting lulled into loving the characters for their quirks, you’re also being pulled slowly into inevitable danger and pain. And you don’t even realise it, just like the girls, that soon you’ve crossed the point of no return. I love this movie for its great combination of dimensional characters and great plotting.

RANG DE BASANTI

For the fun loving way a revolution has been treated. The writer and director knew that if you need to feel for revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, you need to first feel for kids/youngsters who’re like you. And then vicariously as they are faced with grave choices, so are you. And that makes you feel for their heroes as they do. And for the idea of revolution. Hence the apparent coolness factor in the film that draws you into the world of revolution with a fun element to it before you’re suddenly struck with its seriousness.

MIRCH MASALA

To my mind, one of the most potent climaxes in Indian cinema, that probably every woman who has watched it, specially every Indian woman, who lives in a similar social context, can not just relate to but feel a certain elation with. I have watched this film several times with my mother on Doordarshan. It builds gradually towards them becoming one. But begins on the opposite side of the spectrum where they’re disunited and that is their core problem in fighting patriarchy.

SHOLAY

Strangely the two different personality types in this blockbuster have somewhere informed some character traits for Tikli and Laxmi both. And at some level, both are aspects of the other that have been suppressed over time and are now made alive by the presence of that other as an external influence. The silent, less is more type. The talkative, almost irritating life of the party type.

Tikli and Laxmi Bomb

Two sex workers, one older and a new recruit, end up forming a cooperative to bring sex workers together and kick men out of the system, to try to run the sex trade for women and by women.

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