English Vinglish

Shashi is a housewife who makes and sells laddus and earns well from it. But she does not speak English and her family mocks her for it; her daughter does not want her at parent meetings at school. She travels alone to New York for her niece's wedding and secretly enrols in a four-week English course. The subject is not language but respect. What Shashi wants to learn is not English but to be taken seriously in her own house, and the speech at the wedding is not a language test but a settling of accounts. The form is warm and unshowy: a kitchen, a classroom, New York streets. The songs are set inside the narration and there is little dance. The production marked Sridevi's return to cinema after fifteen years. She had been among the biggest stars in Indian cinema in the eighties and nineties; she came back in a leading role here and gave one of the most praised performances of her career. It is Gauri Shinde's first film as a director, and she wrote it out of her own mother. Mehdi Nebbou plays the French cook in the class. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet Indian drama and stories with middle-aged protagonists. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the family conflict carried to the end; the film forgives the husband too easily.