A spirited attempt that loses steam
Phillauri, seen simplistically, is two films in one. As satire, it’s pretty on point. Unfortunately, there’s a full-blown romance rolled in that goes from briefly interesting to dull and long.
Twenty-six-year-old Kanan (Suraj Sharma) is not sure he’s ready for marriage. But his parents are. Especially since he has an eager childhood sweetheart waiting. He flounders through it, helped along by endless joints and Freudian dreams about drowning. Into this fray comes the ghost of Shashi (Anushka Sharma), after a tree is cut down.
The humour remains measured through most of the first half. The absurdity of a manglik marrying a tree — still a prevalent custom; the loud music, the endless drinking and partying, as seen from the perspective of a sceptical 100-year-old ghost.
Yet, there is a solid, redeeming twist that could have held and justified Shashi’s back story. Unfortunately, the film takes on too much – rituals and superstition, patriarchy, class divide, even a bit of colonialism.
Mainstream Bollywood shies away from subjects that aren’t glamorous enough for the multiplex audience. Anaarkali of Arrah does the opposite. It finds perhaps the least relatable protagonist for the urban viewer, and places you in the middle of her desperate struggle to be seen as a person.
Anaarkali (Swara Bhaskar) is an orchestra singer in south Bihar’s Arrah. She is poor, sings lyrics with double entendre, and is treated like a sex worker.
Dharmendra Chauhan (Sanjay Mishra), the vice-chancellor of a prestigious university, gets drunk at one of her shows and molests her. It’s the last straw.
Anaarkali is determined to make the system make him pay. The system doesn’t even acknowledge that an injustice has occurred.
The movie takes cues from