Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022)
Review of Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022)
I swear this movie simply fell into my lap. I had just been writing an article about Alia Bhatt at my job and had ranked this as one of her best performances due to my research and consulting with some friends who actually speak Hindi and had seen the movie in India, and then, two days later, it appeared at the top of my Netflix recommendations.
The tiny little banner declared it as something that had just been released, and so, naturally, I abandoned everything and pressed play. I knew a little bit about the plot going into it, and am familiar with Bollywood movies, so I had some shaky expectations going into it.
Let’s dive into whether those expectations were met or not.
A woman is thrown into the life of a prostitute, but ends up becoming a crime boss aiming to help women’s conditions in the city.
You are probably reading that sweet header above and thinking, how could this happen in only two and a half hours? Yes, this movie is two and a half hours, South Asian movies tend to be long but they are pretty worth sitting down for the entire time. Gangubai Kathiawadi is named after the titular character, who, at the beginning of the movie, is preparing to marry her fiance.
She is a naive, sweet girl who seems to be the darling of the household, as she always follows the rules. But one day, he tells her to bring all the family jewels as they’re going on a trip to his aunt’s. His aunt turns out to be a prostitute head, and he dumps Gangubai there to become a prostitute with the other girls there.
The problem facing a lot of these women is that if they leave the whorehouse and go home, their villages and families will no longer accept them. There’s a specific reputation now facing these women, and even when they go out onto the streets to try and bring in new clients, people look at them differently. Gangubai, at first, refuses to accept her situation but eventually decides that she must accept her fate, but one day a man comes in and brutally attacks her at the brothel.
In order to protect herself, she strikes a deal with the local crime boss, who gets rid of the threat to her safety. When the owner of the brothel house eventually dies, clutching her money until the very end, Gangubai takes over, starting a new reign in this house. She allows girls to leave if they want to, and offers a twisted sense of compassion.
It’s this transformation that Alia Bhatt undergoes during the course of the movie that’s amazing—this is one of her more nuanced roles to date. She has to portray a girl thrust into the situation that not only accepts it, but uses the situation to her advantage. She eventually becomes very powerful in the city, then decides to face a local politician to not only protect the women at her brothel, but advocate for women’s rights as a whole.
Gangubai even gives up her potential lover in order to better the situation of one of her girls, showing how cunning and calculating she is when it comes to getting what she wants.
There are some cheesy elements to this movie, specifically in the set design. I felt like there was such a low budget whenever they were outdoors because it very clearly looked like a set. I get that it’s not set in modern day and it really reflects that in the set design and what the characters look like, but, at the same time, it looked fake—especially the sky. The sky looked like it was CGI.
I do like how this is a Bollywood biopic about a powerful women advocating for women’s rights in 1950s Bombay. We rarely see that in Western media, let alone Indian contexts, so it’s quite refreshing to see it in a movie when it is actually created.
It’s an intimate story about the life of Gangubai and what it took for her to get where she was, and how she came from a horrible spot and eventually used her power for good, so little girls like she was once didn’t have to suffer.
I also enjoyed how Alia’s appearance throughout the movie—she defies the gender expectations of the time by wearing very thick makeup, which would have been a trademark of a prostitute in that era, and she truly rocks it.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a solid biopic with feminist leanings. I can always appreciate those kinds of movies, especially considering I have a tendency to do research towards women in such positions before the contemporary era.
I think Alia Bhatt’s performance is one of the highlights of the movie if you’re not into the actual plot itself, as she is capable of turning her character over three different times.
No other actor in the movie really stands out to me besides her, so she is the shining star. I wasn’t wildly into this movie, like it was fine, but I can see how someone can really like it. All in all though, if you sound interested by any of this, it’s the film for you.
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