Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare Review: Once Again, The Politics in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Film is Peculiarly Disjointed from Craft.
Both the central women in “ Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare” are on a road to evolution and self-discovery. They are at markedly different junctures in life. Dolly is married, she has children, and she is seemingly settled into a pleasant notion of the perfect family prototype. Refusing to step out of her aspirational fantasy that entails a swanky flat, she bears everything with cheerful energy. Underneath the pretence of normalcy lies qualms of a sexually inactive marriage, which her husband attributes to her frigidity. Dolly is expected to serve tea to her co-employees and boss at her workplace and she receives snide remarks about her doing the job as more of a leisurely pursuit.
Kaajal or Kitty has come to Noida, the place of her cousin sister’s (Dolly), to seek a job that enables her freedom from rigidly, parochially limited life back in her hometown Darbhanga. She finds a job at an adult call centre of an app that provides companionship to lonely men. She views the job as a primary conduit to fulfil her wants from life, including filling the vacuum of an absent love life when the charming, thoughtful male nurse Pradeep (Vikrant Massey) calls in and she gets swayed by his air of kind understanding.
But in director Alankrita Shrivastava’s hands, the idea of covert and overt lives strongly, persistently jar against each other and duplicitous agendas and betrayals bubble to the surface. Fantasies are always punctured and the way out of it is hard and bitter but it does wind into some realisation of the characters’ self-growth. Shrivastava sees Noida as a place perched between the ever-present obstinate pull of conservatism and the allures of modernity. We get the most striking shot that demonstrates this tussle when the bus, which Dolly takes to accompany her son to school, whizzes past the vehicle that scuttles Kitty around on her trip as she swigs bottles of beer.
Shrivastava’s cinema is deeply wedded to the variegated textures of a woman’s desire and her abilities to redefine and rebuild herself. She de-links desire from all seemingly prehistoric but shockingly contemporary connotations of shame, censure, harsh or casual misogyny, and locates them in what appears to be healthy, honest and heartfelt discourses. Her intentions are noble, but like her previous film Lipstick Under My Burkha, this too trips in matters of treatment, thereby diluting the many jostling ideas and questions the material interrogates.
The most well-told stories don’t make noise regarding how responsible the storytelling inherently is. This is where Shrivastava stumbles. Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is too aware of what it’s peddling, and I don’t mean it in a clever self-aware way, instead, the film senses the raging relevance of the many hot buttons it’s tapping, and dials up the drama on those counts, undermining the fact that those might have little bearing on the overarching narrative or that they are isolated from the internal journeys of the characters. Though the writing here is a lot more relaxed than her earlier film, she can’t help falling back on her usual heavy-handed approach.
The screenplay is too frantic and unfocused and due to constant toggling among various issues in a cluttered script, the impact of one particular plot point can be extenuated. Shrivastava is too carried away by narrative greed. Besides the prevailing theme of sexual liberation and finding one’s truth and establishing one’s agency and happiness without living under the shelter of lived-in habitual lies, she bungs in the tracks of elusive urban dreams, workplace sexism, right-wing Hindutva cultural wars and rampant policing of unabashed sexual expression. Dolly also faces travails in relation to her younger son who prefers dolls to sports and dressing up as a girl. The call centre job Kitty works at naturally lends itself to ideas of commodification of romance, but Shrivastava does not adequately mine it except for one poignant, telling sequence in the first half. There is also a tackily done episode of near-rape situation Kitty encounters in one of those high-end parties. The queer child track has some swiftly executed moments but she doesn’t let it assume too much gravity.
Buried under a crowded narrative are some genuinely sparkling moments which are few and far in between. The ease into which the film settles is captured beautifully whenever the sisters share the screen, aided perfectly by the sheer generosity exchanged between Konkona Sensharma and Bhumi Pednekar. They work off each other nicely and the film’s most veracious instincts spring when Dolly and Kitty share a drink or two on the terrace, and after much friction, both finally open up to each other about mistakes, denials, and confronting situations without dodginess.
This scene can also be construed as a way to understand Shrivastava’s gaze towards women in her stories. While her stories might suffer on account of ham-fisted thematic handling or unsubtle narration, she recognises rounded portraits of women’s inner lives, and she never exhibits any inclination of skirting prickly, uncomfortable realities.
Konkona brings a lovely lightness in her performance though her register occasionally slips; both Bhumi and Konkona are beset by uninspired writing. Both bring more heft to their scenes than what the dialogues afford them to. Aarti Bajaj helps the first half coast along breezily but some scenes that have to do with each character’s grief and loss are not allowed to stay the course and fully breathe. There’s also a baffling scene where Dolly’s estranged mother comes to visit her. I understand that the scene wishes to examine how a mother can feel her scope and personally stifled by her own family and the all-consuming responsibilities a child bring, but the scene feels too awkwardly staged.
Vikrant, with limited character scope, is brilliant. Amol Parashar as the delivery boy Osmaan who is an agent for Dolly’s self-discovery, is an utter delight.
The film has a climactic shootout, killings that are totally bizarre and inorganic and mar the viewer’s impression. The whole Hindutva gang subplot should have been edited out and the less we speak of the Karan Kundra track, the better.
Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare glimmers with a plenitude of questions it strongly feels for and is truly, sincerely interested in, but the earnest performances can’t tide over what is an essentially a severe debacle on the writing front.
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