Darling’s Movie Review: Alia Bhatt raises the bar for movies with meaning
There are a few things thereDarlings‘, a film that brings domestic violence to the fore, gets it absolutely right, the most striking of which is the way it has created its couple – a man who keeps beating his wife; and the wife who keeps believing, in a twisted mixture of hope and desperation, that ‘ek din woh badal jaayenge’ (one day he will change).
A serial wife bitch doesn’t do it because he’s forced to; he does it because he likes it. It makes him feel like a big man in his own house, after being unmanned everywhere else, especially at his workplace where he is treated like dirt. And a woman who continues to ignore the violence, hiding all evidence beneath a smiling facade, does so from a place of almost unreal resilience that most sympathizers recognize.
On that score, Alia Bhatt and Vijay Varma are spot on, as the beautifully written Badru and Hamza, whose ‘love marriage’ a few years later becomes a cyclical series of beatings followed by apologies. And this is the other crucial element that feels just right: When Hamza watches Badru dutifully making his pao-omlette breakfast in the daylight, he is overwhelmed. He tries to make up with her, she resists, he puts on the charm that made her fall for him in the first place, she melts. The pattern is hard to break.
Watch the trailer for Darlings here:
It’s a toxic world, but it’s theirs, and until the time we join the back and forth between them, the film holds us. Bhatt’s mercurial shift of moods reveals her emotional temperature underneath: very few actors working in Bollywood today have her ability to register moods without saying a word. And Varma is terrific: As a ticket collector at the bottom of the pole in his office, enslaved by a jovial bully (Karmakar), he hasn’t really gotten what he wanted, so he wants to make sure no one else can get what they will have. It’s all command-and-control, and he never puts a foot wrong.
The other powerful action is from Shefali Shah. As Shamsu, mother of Badru, she gives full support to her daughter, but she is not just a doorstop. We see a woman using everything she has to keep her head above water, the hard laugh she has had to go through to raise her daughter single-handedly only mentioned in passing. She’s trying to make something of herself, and the banter between her and her earnest, handsome accomplice (Rohan Mathew) as she begins to ply her wares as a home cook adds a touch of amusement to proceedings. He’s also very good and you’ll want to see more of them, an odd couple that makes you smile.
It’s fine until there. After interval, in an attempt to lighten the ‘heavy’ subject of domestic abuse, the film begins to build on its black comedy aspect. Between cooking ‘mirchi ka salans’ and spicy biryanis, mother and daughter clumsily find ways to take revenge. A heavy-handed cop who tries to be helpful (Maurya) appears. But the gags don’t really land, the comedic touches feel forced, and a contrived sequence or two becomes irritating in a film that is otherwise so aware of its characters and their motivations.
But the climactic sequence, which has satisfying weight, saves ‘Darlings’ from going off the rails. With her maiden production, packed with a number of excellent performances, Alia Bhatt has raised the bar for films with meaning, something a lost Bollywood can do with.
Darling’s movie cast: Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, Vijay Varma, Roshan Mathew, Rajesh Gupta, Vijay Maurya, Kiran Karmakar
Darling’s film director: Jasmeet K Reen
Darling’s movie rating: 2.5 stars