Crowd-pleasing hit with a light feminist slant, it’s India’s official Oscar submission for 'Best International Feature Film’ and you’ll see why as director Kiran Rai hits nothing but net in just her second feature after an inexplicable 13-yr gap. The basic plot description makes it sound like a painfully broad rural comedy of ill-manners (something on Telemundo?; a special HEE-HAW episode?) as two just-married brides, veiled & similarly dressed, escorted by husbands they hardly know, get mixed up in a crowded train and wind up being hurriedly dragged off by the ‘wrong’ husband to different cities. Cue laughtrack & screwball sound effects. But no! Nothing of the sort. Instead, a smart, touching, funny, forward looking story of morbidly unassertive ladies in 2001, too reticent or depressed by their arranged marriages to speak up for themselves. Then slowly finding their bearings thru unexpectedly caring communities and the empowerment of individual purpose while nearly a week races by before their increasingly frustrated husbands and the seemingly incompetent police force start to connect the dots. The film beautifully caught by director Rai as a Northern India rural time capsule and commentary on changing social attitudes & conventions, focused on the possibility of reinvention or perhaps just reintroduction. The tidy ending too neat by half as male authority reasserts in a positive way, but it’s that kind of semi-serious dramedy and, in its way, awfully satisfying. With a bewitchingly eccentric supporting cast, lovely leads and catchy songs to link the episodic nature of what turns out to be more than a guilty pleasure.
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