REVIEW 789: DUNKI

Release date:	December 21, 2023
Director:	Rajkumar Hirani
Cast:	Shah Rukh Khan, Taapsee Pannu, Boman Irani, Anil Grover, Vikram Kocchar, Cameo: Vicky Kaushal
Language:	Hindi

 

There’s always a first time for everything. Your first love. Your first kiss. Your first paycheck. Even your first boring film. 

 

Now there’s a word I never expected to use for a Rajkumar Hirani venture. Yet “boring” is the aptest adjective for the director’s latest film Dunki that he has also co-written with Abhijat Joshi and Kanika Dhillon. Whatever criticism Hirani’s previous works may have deserved (3 Idiots featured that balaatkaar ‘joke’, it starred a 44-year-old as a teen, it favoured broad brush strokes over nuance as did PK, and Sanju was PR for Sanjay Dutt) none of them could be accused of dullness. Much about 3 Idiots was fun. PK was entertaining and brave. Ranbir Kapoor aced Sanju. Above all these, is the joyous Munnabhai series. Dunki feels like it was made by someone else. 

 

Taapsee Pannu here plays Manu Randhawa who wants to prove to her Dad that she’s as capable as a son of clearing the family’s debts and reclaiming the large house they lost. Buggu Lakhanpal (Vikram Kocchar) wants his Mum to quit the job she took after his Dad retired, because men leer at her when she wears pants as part of her work uniform. Balli Kakkad (Anil Grover) wants to release his Mum from toiling as a tailor, but sees no future in the barber shop where he’s employed. In this village where the West is viewed as El Dorado, and migration the fix for all problems, they begin single-mindedly chasing their goal of leaving India. 

 

One of them makes it to London. With no legal route in sight, the others risk death to swim, walk and stow away in vehicles, covering thousands of miles across Asia and Europe to get to their Promised Land. They do this without any idea how they will earn money abroad. They are guided on this perilous odyssey by Hardy a.k.a. Hardayal Singh Dhillon (Shah Rukh Khan). Their story dating back to 1995 is recounted in a flashback 25 years later. 

The film’s title is Punjabi for what are known as “donkey flight” methods used by Indians to gain illegal entry into rich Western countries. It’s a well-established term you will find in press reports, because Manus, Buggus and Ballis exist in large numbers. Just last year, for instance, the media covered the tragic tale of Vaishaliben and Jagdish Patel, a married couple in their 30s from Gujarat, who froze to death with their 11-year-old daughter and three-year-old son in a field near Canada’s border with the US. They were in Canada on visitor’s visas, and died while trying to illegally enter the US on foot. The Patels were not impoverished, not from a beleaguered caste or religious minority, not activists or any category of folks victimised by their government. An excellent BBC profile explained that they were in fact a middle-class couple who probably fell for ‘the American dream’ peddled by human traffickers, had most likely not researched the plight of illegal migrants to the US, but succumbed to a bizarre social pressure to migrate that pervades their Gujarat village. 

 

It would take thoughtful scripting to make a candid yet compassionate film on those like the Patels whose unthinking quest ends in tragedy. The obliviousness to reality of aspiring immigrants from Punjab was captured with a blend of empathy and exasperation in the Canadian Indian director Deepa Mehta’s Heaven On Earth (English-Punjabi-Hindi, 2008). Preity Zinta was remarkable in that film as a woman who leaves the middle-class comfort of her home for what her community deems a prized catch, an NRI groom, only to find that he had hidden the truth that he was struggling for survival in Canada. Heaven On Earth’s heroine was certainly financially better off in Punjab than Manu, Buggu and Balli, but the point is, all four were socially conditioned or pressured not to look before leaping, to emigrate without planning for what lay on the other side of that journey. Unlike Mehta’s film, Dunki does not scrutinise this desperation but romanticises it. 

 

So, worse than Dunki’s tedium is its political immaturity. The script avoids any tricky ground that would require intricate characterisation. It does not examine why the trio did not pursue options in India with the doggedness that they invested in putting their lives on the line to reach the UK. It does not train a critical lens on the patriarchy that drove Buggu and Balli to prefer possible death over earning mothers, nor have the finesse to envisage a situation where a man may understandably worry about a mother he loves, yet not see nearly killing himself as the only alternative. 

 

One character says sorrowfully that strugglers like them are driven to do work in the UK that locals do not want to, like mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. These are tasks that Dalits in India undertake (and are often forced to stick with) because upper castes are contemptuous of such jobs, although the latter are known to take them up when in dire straits abroad. Dunki does not stop to look at whether Manu, Buggu and Balli would have been willing to clean floors and toilets in India, and what the answer to that question says about them and the society they come from. 

 

To effectively address such complex points and still elicit warmth towards the three would have been a challenge, therefore Dunki steers clear of these issues completely. 

 

The film does not even do enough to generate that warmth organically. Maudlin music is played loudly to manipulate the audience into weeping, since the writing lacks flesh and insight. 

 

Dunki’s tone deafness to casteism extends to race too. One ‘joke’ involves the trio’s confusion and stress on sighting a black man when they reach what they think is the UK. They are relieved when they spot a white couple immediately after. Cringe. 

 

Dunki’s arguments favouring illegal immigrants are half-baked, and its poorly reasoned comments on British imperialists unwittingly suggest an equivalence between colonialism and migration. 

 

It is not clear whether subconscious prejudice or a conscious desire to pander to the dominant national mood is at the heart of certain script elements, or these were just instances of mindless writing. Such as the fact that the violence and sadism that Hardy, Manu and Buggu encounter while crossing borders comes from men in Muslim-majority countries. Or that the only kindness they face in this arduous process comes from a white male judge at their court hearing in the UK. 

 

(Spoiler alert) Hardy and his companions are told by the judge that they can get asylum in the UK if they claim they faced persecution in India. He refuses, the rest give in. Was this meant to be a meta moment blurring the line between SRK’s character and SRK himself, as Pathan and Jawan repeatedly did? If so, the writers might consider the meaning that scene takes on in a real-world context in which Muslims in particular and minorities at large are expected to prove their loyalty to India while members of the majority community are not. (Spoiler alert ends)

 

Like all Hindi films aspiring to be mainstream, a romance between the biggest male and female star in the cast is rammed into the script, which brings up the point that the actors playing SRK’s wives and girlfriends are getting younger with each film. Pannu at 36 looks like she might be the nearly 60-year-old Khan’s daughter in reality, and no, saying so does not make this an ageist review – this is a criticism of the ageism that producers, directors and male stars direct at women actors in their 50s who they do not consider attractive enough for a man in his 50s. C’mon SRK, you position yourself as being better than this, so why don’t you do better by women artistes?

 

The sexual chemistry between Khan and Pannu is zilch, which makes the blaring song “Ho aisa waisa ishq nahin, yeh ishq hai Raanjhe waala” sound ridiculous in a painfully unconvincing romantic scene. The fault lies not with the song, but with the scenario. 

 

Frankly, the chemistry between all the characters in Dunki is down to zero. 

 

Still, Pannu gets the space she deserves, which is unusual for a male-superstar-led Indian film (case in point: the short shrift given to Nayanthara in Jawan). She and Grover are good. So is Vicky Kaushal in a cameo. Kocchar and Boman Irani (who plays the English coach Geetu Gulati) can be excused for hamming in their intentionally OTT comedy scenes, but Khan cannot be given such leeway. His over-acting is especially jarring in intense exchanges, and is shown up by successive scenes in which he and Pannu are emotional, she with restraint, he with face all a-quiver. 

 

Pannu is even given weirdly drastic ageing makeup, causing her to advance what looks like 50 years in 25, no doubt to match Manu with Hardy in the present day. Seriously? 

 

Someone please revive the more controlled SRK of Swades, Chak De! India and Fan, or the star who was comfortable enough with his age to make it look sexy in Dear Zindagi. 

 

Dunki’s only truly sharp passage comes early on, cocking a snook at Far Right nationalists’ obsessive reverence for Jana Gana Mana. There’s also fun to be had with Balli’s barbering, Geetu’s classes and the students’ jugaadu solution to their English problem. The latter is hilarious, actually. But there is only so far that these scattered rays of sunshine can take the film. 

 

For a truly intelligent recent account of an Indian illegal immigrant in the US, try catching Danish Renzu’s heart-wrenching The Illegal (English, 2021) starring Suraj Sharma.  

 

Dunki is an over-wrought, over-stretched, over-crowded sample of cinematic mediocrity, marked by clunky writing and puerile politics – an inexplicably incompetent film coming from one of the most successful teams in Hindi film history.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 1.75   

 

Running time:

161 minutes

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB 

REVIEW 772: THAPPAD

Release date:	February 28, 2020
Director:	Anubhav Sinha
Cast:	Taapsee Pannu, Pavail Gulati, Dia Mirza, Maya Sarao, Kumud Mishra, Ratna Pathak Shah, Tanvi Azmi, Geetika Vidya, Ram Kapoor, Manav Kaul, Naila Grewal, Ankur Rathee, Santanu Ghatak
Language:	Hindi

“This is life, after all.”

“Take it in your stride.” 

“This is a woman’s fate.”

“You have made your point, now drop it.” 

Women who object to violence from their husbands get to hear these lines repeatedly, even when the man is a serial offender. If the protest is against infrequent physical abuse or a solitary episode, the volume of these degrading clichés rises manifold. In Thappad, Taapsee Pannu’s character elicits  variations of these responses from almost everyone around her. What makes this film what it is is the protagonist’s – and the writers’ – unwavering conviction that in the matter of spousal assault, once is once too many. 

Writer-director Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad (Slap), which he co-wrote with Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul, features Pannu as a stay-at-home wife whose feelings for her husband turn from devotion to indifference when he strikes her one day. They have been a traditional couple until then. He has a busy career, she makes his dreams her own. While he labours over office assignments, she labours over his every need, serving him meals, chasing him up to the car with his wallet and a beverage while feeding him his unfinished breakfast, caring for his elderly mother, maintaining the house, entertaining guests. 

They seem to be happy. So when she switches off after a single slap, most people cannot understand. As he himself puts it, “Shit happens. It happens. People move on.”

Thappad is not a saga of multiple twists and turns, unlike Sinha’s earlier two politically charged films, Mulk and Article 15. This one has just one big twist – that slap – which is already in the trailer, but what follows is a  heroine’s dramatic inner journey and a gripping chronicle of how it impacts and/or exposes every single person in her life.

Pannu submits herself fully to the role of Amrita a.k.a. Amu. She is so immersed in her character that I almost failed to notice how exquisite she looks in the film – there is that too. She makes Amu’s smooth transition from smiling self-subordination within a marriage to shock to self-awareness completely believable. 

The wonderful Ratna Pathak Shah as Amu’s conflicted mother who evolves during the course of the story, Kumud Mishra as her evolved yet evolving father and Tanvi Azmi as her silently suffering saas form the backbone of Thappad’s large and talented supporting cast. Geetika Vidya shows up as a housemaid who refuses to allow her miserable domestic life to dull her sunny disposition, and is as convincing here as she was playing a combustible policewoman in the  acclaimed Netflix original Soni. Ankur Rathee as Amu’s brother is the only weak link in the chain.

The pleasant surprise of the cast for me was Dia Mirza. For years I have noticed her solely for her delicate looks, but director Sinha manages to tap the artiste in her in a way others have not. She makes Amu’s supportive neighbour special and sweet. 

As the problematic husband Vikram, Pavail Gulati has perhaps the trickiest job in Thappad since he has to convey arrogance yet also help us understand why Amu might have loved him yet not command empathy. He is a guy who is kind to the household help, but thinks nothing of ordering his wife around like a junior at work. He does not have horns on his head, he is just another entitled jerk who is blinded by his male privilege. A fine actor, Gulati is up to the task. 

Thappad beautifully spotlights various shades of men, from the haughty hero to another far more likeable person who is astonished to discover that he – like so many men around us – is a feminist for his daughter but unconsciously patriarchal with his wife.

The script particularly shines in the characterisation of Vikram. Instead of lazily demonising him, Sinha and Waikul write him as precisely the sort of chap about whom family and onlookers tend to say indulgently in real life, “C’mon, he’s not such a bad guy. People make mistakes. Shit happens.” 

Thappad, unlike its many characters, makes no excuses for its leading man. It stands out not merely for taking a stand against domestic violence, but because of its call for zero tolerance. And while the audience may expend energy on wondering whether Vikram will apologise for his actions, the screenplay does not make that Amu’s priority: because the assault startles her out of a stupor after which, far from being bothered about how he will now behave, she is off on an inner journey all her own. 

For all this and more, Thappad is a potent and engrossing film.

It does stumble occasionally though. The background score, for one, needed toning down in the first half. Amu’s lawyer (Maya Sarao) has a relationship with a man that  feels somewhat contrived for coolth. The narrative could have also done without giving each primary character a redeeming moment in the end – not everyone grows, let us accept that. The final exchange between Amrita’s brother and his girlfriend felt more than a little stretched, and the possibility the ending holds out for Vikram made me uncomfortable.

These are lesser issues than the manner in which Thappad’s dialogues pointedly blame mothers for the way daughters are conditioned to accept mistreatment from spouses and deprioritise themselves, with a mention of a father almost as an afterthought. Brief though this is, it is a surprisingly conservative stand from an otherwise liberal film. Of course women are often enablers of patriarchy, but it is one thing to state that – as Thappad does so well throughout – and quite another to have characters playing along with prevalent notions about maternal-versus-paternal responsibility, thus consciously playing down the accountability of the actual beneficiaries of patriarchy: men.   

Whether to play to the gallery or due to a limited understanding of why financial settlements are granted to wives upon divorce, Thappad gets simplistic in a debate on this matter in the film. The least that Sinha and Waikul could have done was address the point that, among other things, such settlements are an acknowledgement of the unpaid work women do in home management, child rearing and elder care, leaving men free to earn.

These are incongruities in a film that otherwise marks an important moment in the history of Hindi cinema. 

Thappad is earnest and succeeds in being engaging throughout, despite its challenging theme. Its awareness of gender goes beyond the obvious. It is significant, for instance, that the leading lady whose  stance on intimate partner violence ends up educating and inspiring others is a stay-at-home wife and not a high-profile professional, thus reminding us that both conformism and rebellion could come from any quarters. It is significant too that she is placed in an educated, well-off family in a city rather than a poor or illiterate household in rural India, which would have allowed sections of the audience to pat itself on the back and pretend that such things do not happen among “people like us”. 

Precisely because of its chosen setting, Thappad is designed to make us uncomfortable about our milieu and compel us to introspect about our own complicity in patriarchy. It also shines a light on patriarchy and gender-based violence across class divides.  

Sinha and Waikul’s contemplative writing is exemplified by the tangential points they make without seeming to make them at all. Such as the recognition of a fact rarely recognised by a society obsessed with marriage and coupledom: that it is okay to be on your own. Or, at a time when Islamophobia and community representation are top of the mind for liberal Bollywood watchers, the casual presence of an important Christian character – a good person at that – in a film from an industry that has virtually erased the community from its stories for decades, once it dispensed with the stereotype of Christians as Westernised, quasi-alien drunkards, gangsters and sexually promiscuous gangsters’ molls. 

And my goodness, the way that slap is presented! Like a bucket of ice being hurled on a sleeping human, or thunder that could end any reverie. Very much like the film itself. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 3.5

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	142 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/thappad-movie-review-taapsee-pannus-most-potent-film-yet-is-a-resounding-slap-in-the-face-of-misogyny-8096321.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thappad

REVIEW 739: SAAND KI AANKH

Release date:	October 25, 2019
Director:	Tushar Hiranandani
Cast: Language:	Taapsee Pannu, Bhumi Pednekar, Vineet Kumar Singh, Prakash Jha, Sara Arjun, Himanshu Sharma, Pawan Chopra, Kuldeep Sareen, Navneet Srivastava, Nikhat Khan, Shaad Randhawa Hindi

If Saand Ki Aankh had been fiction, chances are it would have been dismissed as “improbable” and “typical Bollywood masala”. We know this about the truth yet keep forgetting: it is not just stranger than fiction, it is gutsier, funnier and more adventurous, as this gloriously entertaining film reminds us. 

Saand Ki Aankh is based on the lives of sisters-in-law Chandro and Prakashi Tomar who first picked up a gun in their 60s and have gone on to become multiple-medal-winning shooting champions. Now in their 80s, the Shooter Daadis of Uttar Pradesh’s Johri village have riddled glass ceilings with bullet holes and paved the way for more women (including Prakashi’s daughter Seema who is an international champ in the sport) to step out of their homes in a state otherwise notorious for gender discrimination and violence. 

Two quick points before diving deep into this review: first, Saand Ki Aankh is smashing good fun, as are Taapsee Pannu and Bhumi Pednekar playing the feisty leads; second, however impressive the two actors may be, the casting of young women to play old women subtracts from the impact of the film by placing a question mark on the team’s commitment to its own messaging. This is an industry in which director Rajkumar Hirani and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra cast a then 44-year-old Aamir Khan, 39-year-old R. Madhavan and 30-year-old Sharman Joshi as teenagers in 3 Idiots as recently as 2009, where male superstars for decades have continued to play youth while in their 50s in reality, but women actors beyond their mid-30s are/have been routinely discarded, which is why it hurts so much that even in a progressive film such as this one, women artistes in their 60s have been deemed unworthy of playing women in their 60s. 

It is possible to enjoy Saand Ki Aankh and find it inspiring, yet be aware that, however giant a leap it may be for womankind, it is but a small step towards a day when a Bollywood producer might put their money on a project with a Ms Pednekar and a Ms Pannu playing the younger Chandro and Prakashi while the Tomars’ 60-plus avatars are played by a Neena Gupta and a Ratna Pathak Shah (my dream cast for this film) or Shabana Azmi, Hema Malini, Rekha or any one of the numerous talented and gorgeous women who currently grace Hindi filmdom in supporting roles. For the record, this is exactly how the men in the story have been cast: the young Tomar husbands are played by young actors, whereas older actors play them in their later years. 

Now that I have let off steam about this disappointment, let me tell you what a rollicking ride Saand Ki Aankh is. 

The narrative opens in the late 1990s on the first occasion when Chandro (Pednekar) and Prakashi (Pannu) deceive their husbands and leave their village for a shooting tournament. The story then flashes back to the ’50s when Prakashi enters the household as a bride. She and Chandro instantly connect. Their friendship carries them through a dreary existence that includes unending work in the fields and at home, pregnancy after unwanted pregnancy (unwanted by the women, while their men do not care either way just so long as they get to have sex and sons), and the resentment they harbour against their spouses whose occupations are restricted to impregnating their wives, selling crops the wives have harvested, pocketing the money and lording it over the women. 

Plenty has been reported about the Tomars in the media. Theirs is a fascinating tale calling out to be made into a film. Saand Ki Aankh is directed by debutant Tushar Hiranandani whose 15-year filmography as a writer covers a spectrum of comedies ranging from the misogynistic Great Grand Masti to the pleasant Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge. He does not do to this film what Hindi cinema has long assumed should be done to all women-centric narratives: he does not make it a weepie, nor write a male ‘saviour’ into the Tomars’ saga, nor turn the women into violent avenging angels of the sort that have crowded mainstream films about rape survivors from Zakhmi Aurat to Mom. 

Saand Ki Aankh (written by Balwinder Janjua and co-produced by Anurag Kashyap) is hugely funny and uplifting, yet it never makes light of the grave risks Chandro and Prakashi took while travelling for competitions initially without informing their regressive, restrictive menfolk. In that sense, Hiranandani maintains a perfect tone as he takes us on this rip-roaring ride, deep into a fire that patriarchy could not douse. 

The conservative men in the film are not caricatured, they are ridiculed in a cleverly understated fashion. The women do find support among some men in the family, the village and beyond, but Saand Ki Aankh fortunately does not belong to the Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan School of Cinema that has yielded films like Mission Mangal and Tiger Zinda Hai in which fictional men appropriated the real-life achievements of real-life women to give these male superstars larger-than-life roles of the sort they covet. The Daadis’ coach, for instance, is a well-rounded, neatly written character, but at no point do Janjua and Hiranandani paint him as a knight in shining armour ‘rescuing’ the women from their fate: if there is any rescuing to be done, the women do it themselves. He is at all times portrayed as a darling, a visionary and an ally, but never a saviour. 

Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti’s cinematography, Devendra Murdeshwar’s editing and Vishal Mishra’s delightfully buoyant music are designed to ensure that the coach is not allowed to steal Chandro and Prakashi’s thunder. Who the camera lingers on, who gets those lionising low-angle shots, who the editor and director end each scene with – these choices go a long way towards establishing the supremacy of one character over another in a narrative. With its carefully considered decisions in these departments, Saand Ki Aankh leaves us in no doubt that Chandro and Prakashi are its protagonists, period. 

Hindi film soundtracks have for a while now been toplined by men. Even in last year’s otherwise forward-thinking Veere Di Wedding in which women dominated the storyline, men inexplicably dominated the music (including with a song in which the female leads lip synced to Badshah’s voice). In Saand Ki Aankh, women rule the songs all the way down to the celebratory number running over the closing credits. 

As important as all this is the choice of narrator. Most Bollywood films have men, preferably men with booming baritones, introducing and recounting stories, the unspoken implication being that a voice of authority must perforce be male. Saand Ki Aankh opts instead for a little girl (Sara Arjun), the very one for whose sake a 60-something grandmother picked up the gun in the first place. 

Ms Arjun – award-winning star of the Tamil film Deiva Thirumagal and the Malayalam Ann Maria Kalippilaanu – does full justice to her role as a diffident kid who sprouts wings under Chandro and Prakashi’s watchful eyes. She along with the consistently wonderful Vineet Kumar Singh (Bombay Talkies, Mukkabaaz) playing the Daadis’ coach, director-turned-actor Prakash Jha as their older brother-in-law and sweet little Himanshu Sharma (Dear Dad) as a hapless pawn turned advocate for the heroines’ cause, form part of Saand Ki Aankh’s large and able supporting cast.

Given the task of playing women double their age, Pannu and Pednekar come up trumps in their turn as cheery, fire-breathing warriors. They manage this despite the inconsistent make-up and lighting, which, among other things, leaves their hands youthful forever. 

While the two actors occasionally slip up in their gait and posture as old women, they look so confident as shooters that it is as if they were born to wield fire-arms (I will defer to language experts to assess their accents in the Hindi-Haryanvi dialect spoken in this film). Pannu and Pednekar have sharp comic timing, they play off each other well, and it is as much to their credit as the director’s and writer’s that neither star lures the spotlight away from the other, instead delivering equally finely tuned, sensitive performances.

TV serials in languages across India are filled with nasty women scheming against other women. While women are no doubt often women’s enemies, it is just as true that the entertainment media and the popular public discourse tend to downplay the backroom alliances that women have formed for centuries in their bid to survive back-breaking patriarchy. Saand Ki Aankh stands out as a fine illustration of women who look out for each other, not just in Chandro and Prakashi’s life-long friendship but also in their quiet understanding with the other women in that massive joint family.

The only truly problematic patch in the narrative comes at a party thrown by an erstwhile royal family to which the Daadis are invited. A clash of cultures is inevitable at their maiden encounter with champagne, forks and finger bowls, but instead of being merely amusing, the storytelling here briefly gets patronising towards them for the first and only time in the film. Thankfully this rough spot passes soon enough. 

Saand Ki Aankh’s often exuberant facade belies its thoughtful nature. As much as they are means of repression, the ghungats worn by the leads, like the veils in Lipstick Under My Burkha, also become means they use to escape repression. I was not comfortable with a character justifying the forced sterilisations of men undertaken during the Emergency, but the women’s bemused reaction to this autocratic move serves as a striking comment on how the oppression of the oppressor could unwittingly benefit the oppressed. 

Saand Ki Aankh has all the pizzazz that its name, which is explained within the film, suggests it will. Even in its most comical moments, it is deeply moving because the women are fighting for rights that no human being should ever have to demand: the right to dream, the right to make their own decisions, the right to just have a good time. Watching it is to set off on an emotional rollercoaster of reactions, running the gamut from delirious joy at the heroines’ achievements to anger on their behalf, fear, laughter, tears and whoops of celebration. 

Since the MeToo movement spread across India last October, an ugly generational divide has emerged among feminists, with some seeing no irony in directing ageist taunts at “older feminists” and refusing to acknowledge the contributions of those who have battled before us. Precisely a year later, Saand Ki Aankh is a timely reminder that no matter what our differences may be with them, we all stand on the shoulders of the Chandros and Prakashis of the world who endangered themselves to crash through closed doors so that you and I may now walk through them unscathed.

Rating (out of five stars): ***1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	149 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/saand-ki-aankh-movie-review-taapsee-pannu-and-bhumi-pednekar-are-smashing-good-fun-as-ups-inspiring-shooter-daadis-7546451.html

Photographs courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/RelianceEnt/