Pan Nalin’s “Angry Indian Goddesses” is a chick flick in denial – superficial and skin-deep as most other films, but fools itself into thinking that it is about woman power and women’s rights by throwing big words at the audience and framing shots in slow motion.

It feels as if Nalin packed in all the issues in case another film this witty and powerful would never get made again, which partly works in his favour. It’s a must watch film that will likely spark a dialogue around women’s issues, which is so vital at this time.

Angry Indian Goddesses arrives with audience awards from Toronto and Rome, and it’s easy to see why an international audience would appreciate this film. It presents India’s gender issues on a platter to them, which is congruent with what they read; it’s the same reason acclaimed films set in Africa often happen to be about genocide and extreme poverty.

Hell hath no fury like a woman teased or disrespected. The film has all the right intentions and ideas and actors but it’s just not effective enough. Between celebrating womanhood and showing their inequality angst, the story loses steam halfway.

On the whole, Angry Indian Goddesses is a well-made film with fantastic performances by all the actors. It will win a lot of critical acclaim. But its commercial prospects are poor because of several reasons – its class-appealing subject, its odd English title (due to which many in the public will wrongly assume that the film is in English), too many muted dialogues and lack of awareness about the film’s release among members of the public.

The balance the film achieves is admirable even as it ticks all the right boxes.
One of the most exciting films of the year by far, Angry Indian Goddesses deserves the support of all those who like their cinema to look for fresh thematic pastures and narrative approaches.

…its best moments are the ones with the six women sitting around, cussing, getting drunk, and talking about everything that comes into their minds, with Lakshmi hovering somewhere in the background. When’s the last time you saw a female character in a Hindi film have a wet dream, or come out to her friends? If the answer is ‘never’, Angry Indian Goddesses might make for instructive viewing.

Though the movie has been shot in a fashionably jittery, hand-held style, and the overlapping conversations and rapid-fire editing suggest momentum and purpose, the 120-minute running time is a stretch. Since the movie has saddled each of its female characters with a Problem, it feels duty-bound to address every one of them. The conceit of being a non-formulaic movie that examines Indian social problems in a realistic manner blows up in the preposterous climax, which faithfully follows the scripting rule book that a gun in the first scene must be fired by the end.