At 55, the widowed Usha (Ratna Pathak-Shah) has morphed into one of those tough-as-nails matriarchs you mess with at your own peril. That severity is part of what has so far allowed her to keep the Hawai Manzil—an old family haveli she owns in Bhopal—out of the hands of pesky developers who want to build a mall where it stands; it’s also what’s made her the final word on most neighbourhood matters, particularly as applies to the tenants of the Manzil. In private, though, Usha is lonely and unfulfilled—she realises that whatever authority she holds has a great deal to do with her image as a morally-upright, asexual ‘Buaji’, an image that inevitably precludes any possibility of romance, swallowing up the nuances of her identity: when asked her real name at one point, for instance, she says it tentatively, like she’s forgotten the sound of it. Some consolation is derived from the erotic novels she reads—though always concealed within the pages of more ‘appropriate’ literature—in a vicarious exploration of her own hidden desires. 

And she’s not the only one in the Manzil leading this sort of furtive double life. There’s Leela (Aahana Kumra), feisty and reckless, who refuses to give up her steamy trysts with her boyfriend/business partner, even as she’s getting engaged to another man whose prospects are more palatable to the family. In another apartment lives sweet Shireen (Konkona Sen Sharma), who still hasn’t told her boor of a husband—the sort that believes a wife’s sole place is in the kitchen, and on demand, the bedroom—about her part-time job as a door-to-door salesperson. Youngest of them all is Rehana (Plabita Borthakur), who has a complicated relationship with her burkha: it’s perfect for stowing away the odd stolen accessory from shops at the mall, but it also makes it difficult for her to blend in with the ‘cool kids’ in college—which is why the minute she’s out of eye/earshot of her ultra-conservative parents, the burkha is often pulled off and stuffed into her backpack. 

There’s a fair chance you’ll have heard of Alankrita Shrivastava’s new Lipstick Under My Burkha, if for no other reason than the controversy surrounding the obstruction of its release earlier this year by India’s Central Board of Film Certification for being, among other things, “lady-oriented” and “fantasy above life”, and having “contanious” sexual scenes and swear words and rude noises and what not, as set out in a hilariously ill-written and by now widely-circulated assessment. To be fair, you’ll find all of the above in Lipstick, but that’s hardly grounds enough to ban the film. In any case, that decision has been shot down since, and the film is finally in the clear and within reach of audiences—no doubt a larger crowd than it probably would otherwise have enjoyed if not for the board’s reaction—which is fortunate. Because while not the most cleverly-scripted or well-crafted vehicle for its chosen subject matter—namely, the inner worlds of four ordinary Indian women struggling against the constraints laid on them by social roles and expectations—Lipstick succeeds in, at the very least, starting up a long-overdue and very, very important conversation about depictions of female desire and agency in popular culture. 

In gently teasing out the details of the separate, but in many ways similar, dilemmas of our four heroines—all, notably, at different stages in their lives in a nod to the sheer pervasiveness of the problem—Shrivastava’s film offers a telling look at the persistent, everyday put-downs and aggressions that women encounter. And while the issues might, at first glance, appear specific to the setting, there’s no denying that variations on and degrees of the kind of restrictions shown here will inevitably apply to women in most places, beyond this particular conservative society. And at the centre of the narrative is women’s libido and longing: what all our protagonists want, ultimately, is to have the autonomy to do what they please with their own bodies—to be the subjects, rather than the passive objects, of desire. 

But we’ve never been accustomed to seeing too many regular female characters in film or on TV—other than those dismissed as ‘vamps’ or immoral in some way or the other, that is—being open and frank about their sexual needs, and one of Lipstick’s triumphs is in rendering that vacuum starkly clear. Indeed, there are moments in the film that make you question the extent to which you yourself have internalised these gendered double standards; if the sight of ol’ Buaji slobbering over a young lifeguard makes you a touch uncomfortable, the discomfort itself is a reminder that we’ve been watching aged male characters do the very same thing with much younger women for years and years, to the point where it has become normalised and no longer raises a flag.

Of course, Lipstick does, on occasion, take the simplistic route, placing too much heft on clichéd, and outdated, ideas of liberation—this lessens the effect of some scenes, never more apparent than in the film’s disappointing finale with its forced symmetry. And the men here appear to have been purposefully given short shrift in characterisation. But, overall, Shrivastava has reined in the overt preaching, letting the banal realities of her heroines speak for themselves, and doing so with a great deal of affection and humour. And underscoring the writer-director’s vision are some truly terrific performances, particularly Pathak-Shah, who affords her character immense depth and likeability. Sen Sharma is, as can be expected, extremely believable, as is Kumra. The young Borthakur feels a bit stilted at times, but that could be owing, in part, to the rather reductive version of peer pressure in college life that we’re shown here. 

Lipstick is ultimately proof that we need to populate screens big and small with more, many, many more, women-led, women-centric—or “lady-oriented”, if you’re so inclined—stories if we are to tackle the effects of decades of letting the hetero-male gaze run rampant in popular cinema. In fact, there has to be a veritable deluge of narratives pushed out from not just women’s perspectives, but also that of sexual minorities, to really open up audiences’ eyes and minds to the complex truths of the world we live in. Lipstick might not be perfect, but as a starting point, it more than does the job. Let the flooding begin!  

reel run

3.5/5

Director: Alankrita Shrivastava

Actors: Ratna Pathak-Shah, Aahana Kumra, 

Konkona Sen Sharma, Plabita Borthakur

Genre: Drama