“I am talking about real character flaws: you know, like gambling and stealing”.
While discussing the movie Simran with my mother, I realised one thing: That it is slightly un-stomachable for middle-class women like her, perhaps even men and other movie-goers of this country, to fathom a fellow middle class aurat going about robbing banks, and giving the police a tough car chase.
After all, that kind of degenerate behavior is restricted to the ‘others’, not girls brought up in middle class, god-fearing Indian-American communities. That, perhaps explains why Simran will be no Queen.
Kangana, The Endearing Rani
As Rani, Kangana Ranaut in ‘Queen’ was an endearing character; at first a meek, underconfident woman who gets dumped by her fiance (ah, haven’t we all felt that pain!), and goes alone on what could’ve been her honeymoon to find herself. Some of her actions may have seemed unconventional to a few: like staying in a boy’s hostel, or flirting with a foreigner, but Rani by and large was a simple, naive, endearing and an all-too-nice girl. Through her portrayal of Rani in the slice-of-life film, Kangana too won us over, and in the process, earned herself the unofficial moniker of Bollywood’s Queen.
‘Tanu Weds Manu’, in contrast, had a badass Kangana who drank, swore, had mood swings, created a tamasha, but even considering all that debauchery, she was not someone with too many fundamental character flaws.
Simran is different in that sense. It shows a Praful Patel who is just wrong. Period. And this moral wrongness of her ceases to coincide with Kangana’s earlier ‘cute’ avatars.
There’s something about the flawed woman that frightens our desi collective conscience. As a society, it makes us simply go, “Haye ram, kaisi ladki hai”.
Praful in ‘Simran’ is a Deeply-Flawed Woman
Praful is addicted to gambling. She robs banks, lies – at one time, even violently picks up a table to fling at her father.
Which is perhaps one of the biggest ‘problems’ in the reception of the film.
Simran has not received a Queen-style welcome from the critics, and it does suffer from compromised screenwriting. But could it be that the average audience is finding the character flaws of Kangana more difficult to stomach than the other cinematic flaws?
For starters, Praful Patel is a divorcee who talks back to her father, goes to Sin City and gets addicted to one of its biggest sins.
She is hopeless, reckless and selfish. She is not a self-sacrificing daughter: she will take her dad’s money to pay off her debts.
She is also a whimsical character. The end scene justifies that, when she tells the cops she couldn’t be arrested in the earlier area because it is inhabited by Indians! But really, despite her whims, can we sympathise with a woman who has put herself in trouble?
Even though Praful’s middle-class stature seems very real, she is still not quintessentially middle-class. For starters, she won’t subscribe to the adage we have been taught by our forefathers: to failao our feet jitni chadar ho. When she is driven to the hilt, she will beg, borrow and oh-so-bloodily-steal.
There are also shades of violence in her. The way she attacks her ex, and angrily aims at at her difficult-to-deal-with father are heavily-flawed traits.
Flawed Hero Okay?
But there’s one thing worth pondering about: a flawed male hero has historically been welcomed. Hell! he has even been loved for his badassery, and so, would the movie have been received less critically, had Praful Patel been a man?
The interesting thing about the movie is that Kangana’s character doesn’t reform, disregarding the possible pitfalls of the reception of such a flawed, unreformed woman lead. Although in jail, Praful is planning to indulge in a different kind of gambling –stocks!
The robberies in the movie are also subversive in a sense: while in many Indian movies, the actress is an accomplice in such a sequence, she is often the one driving the car or sitting prettily next to the hero as he drifts far away from the cops. Here, Praful – the female lead – is the main, scheming robber. She has no ‘hero’ as her accomplice.
Kangana as Praful, Simran’s protagonist, is both the hero and the anti-hero. She is both the victim and the perpetrator. She is both the wronged and in the wrong. She is not worthy of your sympathy. Maybe just a little bit of it. Oh, she is so at fault. And she is so wildly, gloriously wrong.
For its first weekend, the movie has collected Rs 10.65 crore over the weekend, a not so great number considering it’s a Kangana starrer. Industry insiders say the movie, like Queen could pick up over the course of the next few days. But even if it doesn’t, could it simply be because of a resistance to a buri, criminal ladki?
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