In the dark and brooding Devashish Makhija directorial, ‘Ajji’, anger is a slow-burning force that takes over the life of a grandmother (Sushama Deshpande in an unforgettable performance). Credit also goes to director Nicholas Kharkongor who offers us a complex story about race and prejudice we are not fully familiar with.įemale anger is often portrayed without nuance in cinema. Gupta portrays Upasana without artifice and gives us a heroine we have never seen before as a protagonist in a mainstream film.
Her determination to cook a special dish to celebrate a wedding finally wins the day and her innocence and strength endear her to us more than any other character. Yet, as the film progresses, we see Upasana dealing with her love life, her conflicted feelings about a friend who was in a relationship with her boyfriend and her own insecurities with increasing confidence. Her body language and habitual diffidence show how guarded and vulnerable she feels in a milieu that treats her and her friends as outsiders. Upasana (Sayani Gupta) is part of the North-Eastern migrant community in Delhi. Here are a few of such memorable characters. A few films in the recent past have however challenged these notions on the big screen as well as on OTT platforms by portraying women in all their depth and complexity. The conventional Hindi film heroine is often one-dimensional, impossibly perfect and confined to song and dance routines.