While watching the opening shots of Queen, I remembered a machine knitted, beige pull-over I have not worn in years. The heroine’s grandmother brought back memories of a grand-aunt in Delhi who plucked her eye brows even in her 80s, had a smart bob and would pull up a high stool in her kitchen to cook because even though her knees had given away, her spirit had not.
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When Kangana Ranaut’s Rani dutifully visits relatives (what a wonderful surprise to see Punjabi actor Navnindra Behl in the role of a French faking grandmother!) in Paris, I remembered relatives who you see at marriages and funerals but who have no real empathy or respect for you. Who cluck at what they think are your misfortunes and then calculate how much shagun is appropriate to send you on your way with.
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As a devastated Rani looks at a baffling map, trying to figure her way through the world without a man she thought would define her whole life, I remembered how womanhood and personhood are two different things in India and how while house-hunting recently, it was conveyed to me by a land- lady that a single woman with a child and two cats does not qualify as a ”family, ” because you see, in India, you are defined by the presence or absence of a man in your life.
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You, I guarantee, will remember your own stories while watching the film, especially if you are a woman. Whether you are from Rajouri Garden or Lajpat Nagar or some small town, you will recognise in Queen, the girl too timid to look life in the eye and cross the road by herself, someone prepared to be screamed at by a disapproving partner whether she is learning diffidently to drive, or planning to start a career or dancing at her own sangeet or has a few sips of champagne on her breath.
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A woman ready to settle in a marriage where she is allowed nothing more than trips to a beauty parlour, a kitty party or two and pre-approved domesticity. You will recognise this girl because she is you or a friend or a sister or someone whose spirit has been cut down to fit into the role of a fiance, a wife, a daughter-in-law and then derided for being too inadequate.
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And then in a shattering moment, when even this feeble security has been snatched, a grandmother or a friend will perhaps knock at your closed mind and say, “Kya pata kaun kahan mil jaaye. Jo milna hai use koi nahin rok sakta. Today this seems like an end. Tomorrow it may turn out to be a blessing.” What and who is meant to be in your life, will be. So don’t wallow, go get one. A life, that is. And that is the point where Vikas Bahl’s Queen really kicks off a journey that we have seen before in other films but none with the kind of transparent honesty that this one exudes from every pore.
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From the cut- out of ‘ Rani weds Vijay’ that is with crude finality dumped in a truck, to the quivering hand of an uncle as he makes a phone call to cancel the shamiyana arrangement at the last moment, the baby brother who will protect his sister from everything even a heart-break, to the stifling room full of wedding paraphernalia and memories where Rani shuts herself after being rejected on the eve of her marriage, every thing smells of life, not cinema.
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Cinema is Cocktail where a repressed young girl dances to her own tune with perfect timing at a Rave Party after a few swigs. Here Rani after a harrowing time in Paris when she has grappled with a thug and has been chased by the Eiffel Tower as if it were a stomping Godzilla from a nightmare, finds deliverance in a rebellious Asha Bhosle song from the 1973 hit Anhonee. In a Paris club, she gets high and then low and cries and shares how perfect everything was supposed to be because she never wore short skirts like ‘those’ convent chicks, obeyed her teachers, her parents, her fiance and never really did any wrong and yet like that uncle who never smoked or drank but got cancer, here she was in Paris, alone on what was supposed to be her honeymoon.
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She then wants to be like the women who are up on the stage dancing away, but she can’t climb up effortlessly because she is clumsy and real unlike a Hindi film heroine. So she is pushed up and then swings her pullover around wantonly, yes, the beige one but can’t bring herself to throw it away so stuffs it into her bag! A song that was once picturised on a smoking and drinking ‘bad’ girl Bindu, helps Rani cross the barrier between who she is supposed to be and who she will become post this moment. A woman ready for change. Just for subverting the context of this song sung by a stereotypical ‘vamp’ and making it about a woman’s freedom, I want to hug Vikas Bahl.
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He is remarkably clever also in bringing into Rani’s life a woman called Vijay Lakshmi who shares Rani’s ex-fiance’s name partially but is a soul-mate who lets Rani see that life is not a borrowed idea or definition but a reality we must create with our own choices, however unconventional they may be. Lisa Hayden is a long limbed cliche but a beautiful one and she brings to the Hindi film screen a refreshing candour we don’t always see. Unlike the free-spirited girl in Cocktail, she does not end up as a pile of pain and remorse and thank god for that!
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The journey Rani makes from a girl frozen in her own invisible box to a backpacker sharing a room in Amsterdam with three male friends who were once just strangers is convincing, entertaining and full of little details that say a lot even without reams of dialogue. Her Alice-In -Wonderland T-shirt, the wall in her backpacker’s hostel where she pins her wedding card as a memory of another time, her growing empathy for men and women she never would have met or approved of (a stripper, an Italian eager for a kiss, a young painter who drinks 4o or more cans of beer ) had she been married and insulated from the world.
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Kangana underlines each moment of significance in the story with the delicacy of a butterfly fluttering her wings. Her face, her voice, her ad-libbing (she is credited with additional dialogue), her rigid body in her staid kurtas, and her ability to convey absolute trust in the man she was once going to marry, to her tiny shifts into a new reality to the moment she is watching him plead but is too distracted and disinterested to prolong his grovelling, are beyond instinct and method. She is rooted in everyday truths, is real like the taste of ‘Indian’ French toast and Delhi’s street food and yet transcendent like a rainbow.
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All there and yet beyond our capacity to see all her shades. Raj Kumar Yadav as a glib Delhi boy full of self-importance and a self-appeasing world-view that doesn’t go beyond his nose, is convincingly irritating. The hand-picked ensemble caste in India and Europe is earnest and hugely endearing. The production design brings to us slices of different realities and takes us from middle-class Delhi homes stuffed with mismatched show-pieces in sunmica wall- units to stuffy European tourist hostels with a great flair for detail. The music by Amit Trivedi is as always unpredictable and flavourful and the writing is both witty and pithy without ever being laboured.
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I kept waiting for the big comeuppance scene full of fiery dialogue and when it didn’t come, I realised how clever Bahl was to not insert it into the finale. Rani doesn’t need to state the obvious. Who she has become is revenge enough. From the lost tourist thinking of these lines,
Jhooti moothi si tooti phooti si, dhundhli dhundli si, main toh idhar-uhdar phiroon, Rani comes home as a woman of the world, a Queen ready to define herself. Strong enough to say ‘thank you’ to the biggest loss of her life because it helped her gain her own spirit. Vikas Bahl has given us a modern classic with Queen and Kangana has gone beyond the token heroines in the 100-crore club to show how to rule a space that belongs to no one but her.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”
Excellent piece, Reema. Exactly my thoughts after watching the movie. Superbly written… beats the other ‘professional’ reviews by miles. Thanks and keep them coming.
Reema, you have the ability to articulate the stray wisps of our thoughts.(well mi ne definitely). I loved Queen and was waiting for someone else to comment on the underlying realties so beautifully stated without becoming pathetic.
lovely review. and agree with all that you’ve said here… it was beautiful in its simplicity and realistic’ness’ without trying to be arty or be anything it was not.. just a simple story.
Loved your review. As usual.