Movie: Gulaab Gang
Director: Soumik Sen
Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Juhi Chawla, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Divya Jagdale, Priyanka Bose, Vinitha Menon
Rating: **1/2
Had Gulaab Gang been made from the perspective of a man, giving due respect to the intentions of the director, it would have merely been just another commercial potboiler on the block being no different from a revamped Dabanng. But, it isn’t the case here. The fact that it is viewed through the eyes of preconceived, painted characters i.e. the female protagonist and the antagonist Rajjo and Sumitra, the emotions hit you harder as the strengths in their characterizations and more so the performances of the ones essaying them, Madhuri and Juhi Chawla, makes us take a look at them beyond their actual cinematic presence.
Madhuri Dixit gets a heroic introduction akin to any movie icon, an act commencing with her silent, gleaming looks and the maker Sowmik Sen delaying the shot purposely to give her presence more weight. Rajjo, a fighter since childhood takes a dig at her step-mother who blatantly ridicules her academic ideas. She braves insults, goes on to establish a society where women no longer need to depend on men for their living, transforming into an embodiment of women empowerment, the godly feminist figure who champions the cause for a educated, nobler society through her mass army Gulaab Gang.
We needn’t mindlessly believe her to be a savior. There’s enough screen-pleasing justification done to cover that aspect. She saves a lady who closely embraces death with her inability to come to terms with the insult after her husband throws her off his palatial house in a demand for excess dowry. She makes the lady slap her better half later for the same reason. A rich politician’s son later molests a girl which she avenges with the help of her aides who go on to destroy his testicles.
Juhi Chawla in a never before territory finds her space well too. As an arrogant, reckless politico, you get to see her gel into the depths of the character when she says to her sub-ordinates, “I am a widow. Can’t you finalise the tax and property papers any sooner at least with that sympathy ?” prior to which you get to know that her husbands death was unnatural. Sen leaves the understanding to the viewers when we are supposed to expect that she would have been behind his death too. Her character Sumitra has no traces of empathy and she is right when she says she trusts perfect timing in politics as a must factor to taste success.
While to everyone’s knowledge, there are only two types of characters, either good or the evil. The latter group are obviously the manipulative, opportunistic and self-bragging troop lead by a politician. The staging, in spite of all its efforts to seem authentic is only a put-on to objectify the groups though. Their moves, down-falls, personal vengeance in an often-crisp narrative are generally laced in a predictable pattern. The baddies mouth catchy one-liners and the one’s in the other camp come up with even better traditional ego-boosting punchlines to overshadow their opponents.
You wait for situations where Juhi and Madhuri interact, make a mockery of each other’s ideals with the smartly written dialogues. The problem surfaces when you search in vain for something beyond the plainness of the good versus evil themed tale. For an instance, the media is portrayed as a mere puppet of the morally correct one. The educational reforms, election campaigns and humanity preachings appear too jaded to buy convincingly. Madhuri Dixit’s acting, dancing form is decent, but her face is close-to-being charmless. Juhi Chawla easily looks the better of her counterpart and underplays her villainous portrayal with some terrific moments in store for her loyalites. Sowmik Sen needed to have worked on not making the ‘triumph of the good’ model seem very obvious. He puts up a good show with the tunes though. The cinematography is neat sans extravagant strokes. Gulaab Gang, on the whole is a passable output that should have been better with a crisper script.
Review by Srivathsan N, who had originally written it for Cinegoer.net