Movie Review: Dolly Kitty aur woh Chamakte Sitaare
A small-town girl who rejected a marriage proposal and came to a city, willing to explore a life of her own making. A well-settled, “happy” housewife and a mother of two boys, living the ideal life — one she was expected to live. Two women existing on the opposite sides of what the society expects from any middle-class woman. The concept of Dolly Kitty aur woh…, right off the bat, grabs the attention of its viewer as it lays the foundations of its storyline. However, much to my despondency, it was essentially a strong story lost amidst all the sex. Yeah, you read that right.
The movie is framed at the backdrop of Noida — with its under-constructed concrete jungles, cramped up flats, overcrowded offices and a dusty skyline — a perfect layout for a story which portrays life of a specific social strata. The story starts with Kitty (Kajal) — who has recently moved-in with her cousin Dolly — accompanying her and her family to a local adventure park. Quite metaphorically, during a haunted house ride, Kitty opens up to her about feeling sexually preyed by her husband. Dolly immediately dismisses her with a pretentious laugh. Common to how such conversations go, even though she knew her husband’s demeanor well enough, she excuses him by telling Kitty that she must be mistaken.
A due appreciation for the writers of the movie — they successfully and very creatively set a personality context of it’s lead women within the first five minutes. A job rather hard to do with a story that has such complex characters.
As we dive deeper into this too-close-to-life tale, we realize that Dolly’s life is not as rosy as it seems to be. Nor is the urban life of fun and freedom that Dolly envisioned for herself executing per expectations. No concept of happily-ever-after for women, it seems.
The movie very remarkably integrates soft topics such as transgendered upbringing, losing virginity, vaginismus, infidelity, and the horrid business of the pornographic industry within its storyline. While these two women navigate such real-life stigmatized concepts, they also go on to uniquely explore what life can look like if they push their boundaries. One portrayed to be pushing it quite explicitly; the other in her own small, disguised ways. How they co-exist, circle-back and enable each other’s “crooked” personalities to evolve is worth our time and attention.
Perhaps the only hiccup I had with the movie were its sex scenes. To be precise, the sex scenes themselves were not a problem. But more often than not, the amount and extent of those seemed to hijack from what was happening within a story which had to be delivered in the span of those 120 minutes. Somehow, it seemed that sexual exploration of women became the key theme, when it was successfully incapsulating many other powerful and rather important socio-feminine themes in itself. A rather disproportionate attention given to it took away from any emotional involvement that a viewer could have felt as the story concluded. The end of the movie felt quite rushed and abrupt — not living up to how it began. Some characters arcs within the story were quite nebulous, which made the end feel even more unkempt.
Leaving that aside, the most appreciable aspect of the story is the frenemy relationship between Dolly and Kitty. Sisters on paper, enemies in concept, but women who understand each other at the end of a hard day. The conversation they had under the night sky (chamakte sitaare), with disappointments weighing them down as they sip on a glass of whiskey, will stay with me for a while. And it really made me question — we all could fare well if the porn/tech industry paid more attention to attracting female consumers. They are truly underestimating the gold they can mine with our consumer base.
