Queen: The Modern Indian Woman

When Queen was released worldwide last month it was hailed with universal acclaim. The Bollywood establishment, critics, and audiences were unanimous in their praise of this fresh and wonderful story. However, now that I've finally gotten around to watching it, I can't help but wonder what they were talking about.

Queen is the story of Rani (Kangana Ranaut), a sheltered Delhi woman who is shattered when her fiancé, Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), gets cold feet two days before their wedding and calls the whole thing off. He was studying engineering in London and thinks he is too changed and wordly while Rani is still a conservative and naive girl who goes everywhere chaperoned by her younger brother. Rani hides in her bedroom for a few days, thinking about how she and Vijay fell in love, while her family members rally around and unhelpfully tell her things will get better. Finally, she decides that she is going on her honeymoon trip to Paris and Amsterdam alone. And what follows is a riotous adventure where our heroine discovers who she is and learns to become a modern woman.

The trouble with Queen is the trouble with a lot of Bollywood cinema. Subtlety is forsaken for the sake of broad strokes and generalizations. I was prepared to love this movie and the first half hour showed a great deal of promise. The opening montage of Rani's wedding preparations features Rani's internal monologue, a rare insight into what's going on inside an Indian woman's mind before her wedding. As Rani smiles and laughs with family members, we are privy to her nervous excitement and worries about various matters, both petty and significant. It was a marvelous device, one that I hoped would be employed throughout the film. Unfortunately, that is the last glimpse we have into her mind. What follows is "show" rather than "tell," and every cliché that Bollywood cinema can dream up about the clash between East meets West.

As Rani travels in Paris and Amsterdam, her female acquaintances are all South Asian women living Western lives. We have the hotel maid who had a child out of wedlock with her Parisian boyfriend and casually sleeps with hotel guests. There's a Pakistani lap dancer in Amsterdam's red light district, talking about how her conservative family would be aghast to know about her life, but hey, she has to find some way to make money and this is what you do in a recession. These are empowered women who are happy with their life choices, but is this really the only way that Rani can have a revelation about her sheltered life? Considering that her fiancé casually forbade her from working because he was perfectly capable of taking care of her, isn't it sufficient for Rani to just befriend a single woman with a job who happily supports herself? Do we really need to drive the point home by forcing her to try low-cut tops, get drunk, and dance on counters Coyote Ugly style?

The movie occasionally employs subtle but evocative imagery that makes a much more powerful statement than these other shenanigans. An example is Rani's luggage. When she first travels to Paris, she is encumbered by a heavy suitcase, which she sadly drags up to her hotel room, struggling under both the physical weight and also the emotional knowledge that she is doing this because she has no husband to help her. However, after her eye-opening travels, she returns to India with a utilitarian rucksack, her life conveniently packed up, carried by her own two shoulders, a wonderful metaphor for her new-found independence. Kangana Ranaut is an expressive and astonishing actress - it is a shame that the filmmakers couldn't trust her to carry this film on her capable shoulders rather than saddling her with a cinematic suitcase of tired tropes and predictable scenarios.

The nature of Bollywood is to go to extremes. I was hoping with movies like Kahaani and English Vinglish, we were starting to see movies about women that were told with a deeper feminine understanding, and a willingness to just let Indian women celebrate themselves rather than hold themselves up to Western standards. Even in English Vinglish, it seems like an Indian woman has to go abroad to find her voice, because society will stifle her every attempt to speak while she remains in India. So Bollywood, work on movies that focus on change from within rather than without. You've made a promising start, but you're no where near the finish line.