Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, director Alankrita Shrivatav’s most recent work, is set in typical middle-class Noida. It is a story about two women whose migration to the bigger city is societally approved.
A Story of Two Women
Dolly, the older sister, is played by the ephemeral Konkona Sen. Her married life in an almost-big-city is punctuated with small self-made joys: the AC she rents for her Noida home, the jewellery she casually forgoes to have some money in-hand, the pleasure of a first long sip of a home-delivered smoothie, the cut-sleeves top she buys for herself.
Her life is not overly dramatic. Small tragedies unfold almost every day. We see her navigate them, tackling those small-big issues as they are handed to her, often without the option of choice.
There is an easy understanding between Dolly and her cousin Kajal who moves into the small and kitsch Noida flat that Dolly shares with her husband and two young boys.
Kajal, played by Bhumi Pednekar, is a young woman from Bihar. She’s pursuing her dreams in the ‘big city but struggles to let go of her small-town moralities. Kajal’s working-class reality repeatedly intersects with a patriarchal, nationalistic society. She’s forced to confront much of what she has learnt to ascribe as values.
Feminism As More Than Refuting Patriarchy
In India, mainstream or otherwise, feminist films often have to pass some cardinal tests. The Bechdel Test is a standard. A more recent looming question is whether the film has what we call The Female Gaze.
Working and researching in the scope of gender for close to a decade has made me question what feminism looks like outside the set realms designed by the omnipresent (capitalist, patriarchal) framework. Does a feminist act exist beyond the scope of contrary assertion, beyond the constant need to shatter glass ceilings, metaphorical or otherwise?
More often than not, the measure of our feminism is adjunct to refuting existing patriarchal and capitalist frameworks. At the same time, we continue to live and work within those same structures. My curiosity about this conundrum led me to Adrienne Rich. She came into the limelight during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Rich asked a seminal question: if women “are thinking in ways in which traditional intellection denies, decries, or is unable to grasp?”
Decades later, in Dolly, Kitty Aur Chamakte Taare, Alankrita Shrivatav does just that.
Feminism In Everyday Lives
As Dolly and Kajal’s stories interweave, the protagonists’ lives are a product of their own choices. The men in the frames are consequences of the circumstances the women occupy, and never the drivers of the story.
Given that standard four-act structure of films are most often centred around the hero’s crisis, narratives like these are barely enough to capture grandiose imaginations or line box offices, for that matter. It was no wonder then that Dolly Kitty Aur Chamakte Taare received tepid reviews in the mainstream media.
However, for a wayward viewer like me, the film was reminiscent of the eloquent lives of women I know. People whose stories are not speckled with grandeur, but are of inadvertence. Women who are making space for themselves inch by inch. Like my mother, my aunt, a schoolfriend from my hometown. Lives into which I only have a voyeuristic lens. Stories not of grand struggles, or taking feminist stands, but of omniscient living where any act of desire is transgression.
Normalising The Ordinary
Dolly, Kitty, Chamakte Taare is, perhaps, the first time in Indian cinema these ordinary lives and desires have been portrayed. And, without guilt or a sense of breach, like I’d see on my mother’s face when she spent an amount considerably more than what she set aside, on a saree she really liked. It was a delight, therefore, to witness a Dolly, sell a piece of jewellery she wasn’t too fond of, to just instead spend the money on a cut-sleeves top she fancied. Moments like these, sprinkled throughout the film, where the multiple protagonists validate their own desires, guiltlessly, if not majestically, that made the film extraordinary for me.
Despite the many hurdles and traumas, small and big, Dolly and Kajal are the driving force of their lives. Kajal finds financial independence in a call centre job that under the garb of selling gifts and chocolates enables quick ejaculations for men. She soon moves out into a PG mostly occupied by women who offer their womb on rent, often to make rent. In her new avatar, Kitty seduces men on the phone, takes pride in the Rs. 30,000 salary and the platter of Continental and Chinese dishes she can choose from her office’s lunch menu.
Leading Unapologetic Lives
The first time a man masturbates to Kitty’s voice, (while we the audience, see his wife lying lifeless, supported by a ventilator, in the adjacent room) Kitty throws up. But, she doesn’t feel sorry for herself, unlike what often happens when men are the narrators for such stories. Alankrita’s women are not apologetic about their lives or their choices.
Soon, Kitty learns the ropes of the game. She figures out how to engage playfully, withhold her affections to the effect. On a particular instance, when she gets too involved with a repeat client, she pretends to seek her boss’ approval, just as he is about to chide her.
It is these nuanced moments and small victories that hold together the feminine in this film. These stories are underrepresented — may be unrepresented — in modern feminism.
Drawing A New Framework For Feminism And Sexuality
In a world where feminists are still unentangling themselves from the domains created by patriarchal structures, Alankrita Shrivastav’s film redraws the framework. Her protagonists – Dolly and Kitty champion small, personal revolutions – the kinds that we tend to so often sacrifice at the altar of a more significant, more assertive movement.
For Kajal, her struggle is to find the locus of her own sexual desire, battling the complex mesh of morality, choice and independence. Her love interest, a lying, cheating Pradeep, is someone she meets and to whom loses her virginity (IRL) – is a transference from Kitty. Dolly’s crisis comes in the form of an unfeeling vagina. One that is termed ‘frigid’ (medically and otherwise). Her sexual tenderness, seen subtly through various expressions of her character, finds fulfilment in the child-like romance that between her a young delivery boy, Osman Ansari.
Sexual politics are woven through a narrative of the two women seeking out their pleasure. Be it in moments of tenderness between Dolly and Mansoor as they awkwardly hold hands while walking through a graveyard, or in the form of Kitti taking charge in bed. While the former is not glossed over and romanticised, in the latter, the gaze is not sexualised. This is a feat that stands entirely on its own in the portrayals of love and sexualness in Indian cinema.
Sexual, But Not Sexualised
Tiya Tejpal’s thoughtful production design plays with spaces and colours that are typical to the household. But, with a subtone of sexualness that is never overdone. In Kitty’s devoutly Christian PG, incipient lacy bras hang from the crucifix. Dolly’s red bedroom (and clothes) are kitschy, feminine, but never sexualised. When Dolly and Mansoor finally have sex, they do so in Dolly’s bedroom, in broad daylight. Through this scene, Alankrita creates an intimate, delicate and fulfilling moment for both the character and the viewer. It is such scenes that make film worth all its two hours and ten minutes runtime.
As the story progresses, Dolly and Kitti’s lives play out silently, combating with and drawing from the other. Several sub-plots unfold that touch upon India’s many political and sexual realities, without making pomp and show about them. The film deliberately leaves loose ends, while silently empathising with those at the lowest rungs of social hierarchy.
Personal As Political; Micro-Moments As Magical
Dolly, Kitty, Chamakte Taare does not have memorable dialogues (which are sparse); the film exists, silently, as women often do. There are no grand, feminist gestures, or even a resolute climax. This speaks volumes to the filmmakers’ politics. The movie’s beauty lies in its small moments, such Dolly’s faint smile when she sees a vagina installation at a Noida fair.
Dolly, Kitti Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is a rare film that lends an Indianness to femininity. It does so by telling stories of everyday feminism; stories are often too deemed lacklustre by mainstream filmmakers.
Alankrita’s protagonists are women lodged in different spectrums of the social order. Each makes their own choices, inspiring, empowering each other, even in their moments of conflicts. The filmmaker has reimagined the assigned framework within which women-led films are allowed to exist.
There were moments when I, the viewer, was afraid, almost convinced would lead to violence. When Dolly’s tension with her husband is at its peak; when Kitty confronts her cheating lover, for example. Alankrita stops short there, as though recharting what we, the Indian audience, have learned to expect as ‘normal’ behaviour from men. And in that, she joins the ranks of Lorde, Rich and Steinman, in reimagining the possibilities of a world, where women’s stories thrive, resplendent in their own fullness, beyond the paradigm of oppression.
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