Pataakha

In a village in Rajasthan, two sisters, Badki and Chhutki, have been fighting since the day they were born. The fights are real and hard: hair pulled, fists, blood. Their father thinks marrying them off separately will solve it, and the sisters end up brides in the same house. The film is not interested in family comedy. It is interested in enmity becoming identity: neither woman knows who she is without the other, and the film pushes that into a metaphor reaching as far as the hostility between two countries. The form is loud and physical: the fights are staged to look real and the actors are in the dust. Vishal Bhardwaj does not soften the language or the violence of the countryside. The source is a short story by Charan Singh Pathik. Bhardwaj directed and wrote the music; Gulzar wrote the lyrics. Sanya Malhotra and Radhikka Madan play the sisters, and Sunil Grover the villager who keeps setting them against each other. Who it is for: viewers who like Indian independent cinema, rural stories and unusual women characters. Who it is not for: anyone after a restful film. Nobody stops shouting for two hours and the repeated fights become tiring.