Calendar Girls: Same difference

Cast: Akanksha Puri, Avani Modi, Kyra Dutt, Ruhi Singh, Satarupa Pyne
Rated: 5/10
You’ve seen Fashion, you’ve seen them all, or so it seems when you sit through Madhur Bhandarkar’s yet another one on the grease behind the glam.
To a large extent, the predictability of Calendar Girls kills the movie, now thatFashion has been seen to death. It’s all the same, be it high society, Bollywood or the modelling world. You come, you achieve, you struggle for your next project, you get exploited or you quit and, worst still, you die. Nothing new in this now that we have seen the rise and fall of Priyanka Chopra and Kangana Ranaut as Fashion girls.
To top this, even though Bhandarkar has done his girl scouting well for Calendar Girls, the absence of a star takes a lot away from the film. Unknown faces from four small or medium towns of India, with a past, leave their middle class moorings behind to shoot in Mauritius as the next calendar girls.
What follows, or should we say, what Bhandarkar unfolds, depicts his queasiness with the subject. The aftermath is all mixed up. The atrocities, the exploitation, the betrayals, the muck of fame — all this and much more captures a major part of the film, which, strangely ends on a mixed note — that not all is bad. Why would someone like Bhandarkar chicken out from the ultimate and dirty truth of the glamour world is bewildering, especially when he has been stark earlier too.
Top this with a wanton skin show enhanced by ill-fitting and outlandishly holed clothing (especially of the Rohtak girl) and it is quite out of place, just as is the presence of an aspiring Pakistani girl who comes in with Bollywood dreams but ends up being an escort girl who finally dies without a soul to bury her, but not before she is made to sleep with her friend’s philandering husband.
Calendar Girls, and its situations, tell you that it is you who chooses to become what you do and that it is up to you how far you can compromise with all-round and unrelenting exploitation. Many would disagree.
As for the film, it’s the familiarity of the situation with other Bhandarkar films that maims this one despite being slick and cohesive. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, September 27, 2015
 

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