Veere Di Wedding is a box office hit despite being banned in Pakistan and being slammed by right-wing groups. But is it a feminist achievement?
A movie dubbed “India’s answer to Sex and the City” is drawing criticism for its explicit content and igniting debate about what feminism and sexuality mean.
Veere Di Wedding, or My Companion’s Wedding, is a two-hour satire that was restricted in adjoining Pakistan as a result of revile words and scenes of a sexual sort however endure a blacklist bring in India.
Delivered on June 1, it has proactively made around $12m, as indicated by the film’s makers.
Veere Di Wedding, in contrast to the majority of Bollywood buddy-comedy films, features four wealthy female friends who drink, smoke cannabis, curse their partners and families, and discuss the difficulties of marriage and sexuality.
The main characters are played by well-known actors Kareena Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor Abuja, and Swara Bhaskar, as well as Shikha Talsania, who lives in the south of New Delhi.
As a result of their support for the boycott, right-wing and ultraconservative segments of Hindu society have taken to social media to express their displeasure, criticizing the film for its open sexuality, which they claim is incompatible with Indian culture and values.
Many individuals expressed their displeasure with one scene, in particular the one in which Bhaskar’s married character Sakshi Soni masturbates, via tweets to the actor.
Bhaskar tweeted on Wednesday to defend the scene, saying: It is empowering to see a girl in a film expressing her self-satisfaction in a non-judgmental way in a culture that largely silences, ignores, or shames female sexuality.
The main (wedding) event of Veere Di Wedding, produced by Rhea Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor and directed by Shashanka Ghosh, transforms into a device that enables its protagonists to reveal the hypocrisies and complexities of relationships.
[The scene of masturbation] was completely Rhea’s idea. She was 31 years old, so she didn’t want to show any typical cheating. According to director Ghosh, she said, “et her moment of shame be dysfunctional, too.” I am proud of the fact that the movie does not criticize any of its characters for their actions.
I wanted to make a movie about friends becoming family after toying with the idea for years. However, I wanted the friends to be like normal people: dysfunctional. I could have used four boys to tell the same story.
While Kalindi (Kapoor), the bride-to-be, struggles with class issues and is unsure if she wants to marry Rishabh (Sumeet Vyas), her three bridesmaids are dealing with their own challenges.
Avni’s nagging mother (Kapoor Ahuja), Sakshi’s messy divorce, and Meera’s (Talsania) homemaker marriage to a white American with a two-year-old son have all resulted in a lack of intimacy.
While some critics have hailed Veere Di Wedding as a feminist masterpiece, others have questioned the film’s message to everyday Indian women, the vast majority of whom do not enjoy the same privileges as the lead characters.
The film lacks nuance, according to associate editor Ruhi Tewari of The Print, a Delhi-based publication.
“To sell us on the idea of liberation, women do not need to be shown drinking, smoking, using sexist language, or talking about sex in every frame.
“Sure, it is a woman’s absolute choice to do so; however, it is a little excessive to give the impression that these are the actual parameters of modernity while avoiding more pressing issues. She wrote in a review, “The biggest problem with the movie is how forced everything seems, just to shock the audience.”
The film was “carelessly made,” according to Paromita Vohra, a Mumbai-based writer, filmmaker, and the founder of Agents of Ishq (love), a popular website about love and sexuality. However, the film was ultimately a feminist success.
“Feminism is a journey of letting go of our conditioning and finding a new version of ourselves through desire.” She explained to Al Jazeera, “The movie contains an entire universe of human desire.”
Anupama Kapse, Loyola Marymount University’s professor of film studies, stated: While female pleasure is at the center of the film, many feminists believe that sexuality is not a part of the feminist project and that sexual pleasure is not feminist.
Despite its conventional structure, it is a novel film. A wedding is the subject of the film. In any case, inside that design of a Bollywood standard film, it figures out how to penetrate a ton of ideas around an Indian wedding.”
The beginning-to-end raucous critique of conventional relationships from a female perspective is uncommon, and the masturbation scene is an obvious first for Hindi cinema.
Everyone has mixed feelings about marriage. Even [Kapoor Ahuja’s] character is under pressure from the outside world to conform to her mother’s wishes. She is considering the possibility that she ought to wed, but she is unsure. Vohra stated, “Her heart is not in it.”
Veere Di Wedding is subversive for Kapse because it detaches female characters from the predominance of motherhood in Indian cinema by emphasizing female appetites over domesticity. Kapse’s work has focused on the concepts of pleasure and suffering in Indian cinema.
She went on to say, “For instance, when Kapoor Ahuja’s character wakes up from a one-night stand and sees the man’s mother outside the window, or when her potential groom objects to her kissing on his cheek, she calls him a’mother lover’ and asks him to marry his mother instead.” Subversion is made simple by humor.
