Wonder Women movie review: Anjali Menon made this? Really?

Cast: Nadiya Moidu, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Nithya Menen, Padmapriya Janakiraman, Amruta Subhash, Sayonara Philip, Archana Padmini, Radha Gomati

Director: Anjali Menon

Language: English with some Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada

Sometimes a film’s first few minutes are a warning bell signalling everything that’s wrong with it. As writer-director Anjali Menon’s Wonder Women opens, mothers-to-be gather at a pre-natal preparatory centre run by a lady called Nandita (Nadiya Moidu) in Kerala. Mini(Parvathy Thiruvothu), Nora (Nithya Menen), Veni (Padmapriya Janakiraman), Jaya (Amruta Subhash), Saya (Sayonara Philip) and Gracy (Archana Padmini) come from disparate backgrounds .Also in the room is Veni’s mother-in-law (Radha Gomati). Jaya is the only non-southerner among them. When she asks Nandita to conduct the sessions in Hindi instead of English so that she can follow them, the others pounce on her. Sweet, polite, paavam Jaya. The group gets louder when she asks in surprise, “Why don’t you know Hindi? It’s the national language, is it not? ”This of course is one of the falsehoods most widely prevalent in post-Independence India; a Goebbelsian lie repeated a million times by propagandists, until most Indians have come to believe that it’s the truth. A chorus of voices is raised to correct Jaya, until Mini yells at them to shut up. “When the baby comes you will all be screaming just the same,” she says.

This is a bizarrely conceived scene. It villainises persons who are articulating genuine real-world concerns about Hindi imposition and simultaneously treats as a hapless victim an individual who asserts Hindi’s primacy over other Indian languages. Further obfuscating the depiction here are indications that Jaya is from a lower economic strata of society than the rest (barring Gracy). She is also written as a gentle, innocent soul. So when the others get angry with her, it comes across as rich women ganging up against a less moneyed woman, and the issue they raise is lost. This is a terribly messed-up portrayal of intersectionalities.

In a country where Hindi supremacism is a long-standing reality, and the political and economic advantages of being a Hindi bhaashi are not acknowledged in the public discourse on social privilege, one has to wonder who this film is pandering to by painting Jaya as being under attack while the south Indians in the picture are projected as inconsiderate creatures.

Skewed politics is not the only failing of this introductory passage in Wonder Women. The dialogue writing is strained, community clichés abound, an air of pretentiousness pervades Nandita’s centre, and each of these elements spills over into the entire film.

Anjali is one of Malayalam cinema’s most respected figures, with the blockbusters Bangalore Days and Ustad Hotel (which she wrote, not directed) to her credit. Wonder Women is written primarily in English, a language with which she flounders as a scriptwriter. The film’s calling card then becomes its roster of talented actors whose collective charisma and involvement in their roles far outshines the written material at hand. This star-led ensemble cast is stuck in an amateurish, stereotype-ridden film that has an odd understanding of inclusiveness and determinedly shuns the cultural rootedness Malayalam cinema is admired for.

Wonder Women runs for a little over 1 hour and 19 minutes, which feels like 1 hour 19 minutes too many. Nora is the only one who has some sort of interior journey within this time frame, but the portrayal of that journey is garbled. We hear that she has lost interest in her career since she became pregnant. She is shown condemning mothers who are passionate about their work outside the home and who, as she puts it, send their kids to boarding school or leave them with a nanny. If more feminists write such lines, then the misogynist’s job is made easy.

No doubt there exist women who make such regressive assertions, but what’s troubling here is  that the assertion is left uncontested by the other characters, nor does anyone ask Nora what role she thinks Dads should play in childrearing – not even after it is hinted that she resumes her professional pursuits. Elsewhere, we hear that the husband of one of the women wanted her to abort her foetus. It is unclear whether she left him because she is anti-abortion or because he denied her the right to choose for herself. Such fuzziness in fundamental matters must be music to the ears of Project Patriarchy.

The list of stereotypes in Wonder Women covers a wide expanse of social prejudice. Apart from careerists as bad mothers and the aggressive Tamilian (whose legitimate opposition to Hindi imposition is presented as unpleasantness and intolerance), the latter doubles up as the evil mother-in-law trope. The only pregnant woman in the group who is not married to her partner is based not in Kerala but in Goa … wait… Are Malayalam filmmakers now borrowing Bollywood stereotypes?

Each of the women is defined by a single quality. Those who are shown to evolve do so abruptly. Veni’s imperious mother-in-law, for instance, transforms dramatically from bully to ally within the span of a single scene. The writing of the men is even more superficial.

Wonder Women also belongs to that category of films coming from Malayalam filmmakers who seem to believe that cosmopolitanism and coolth can be conveyed only by English and Hindi, never by Malayalam. The soundtrack has two songs, one Hindi and one English. A language you hear very little in this film set in Kerala is…guess which one…Malayalam.

This is especially jarring coming as it does at a time when many intelligent viewers have been criticising Hindi filmmakers for setting stories outside the Hindi belt with dialogues written entirely in Hindi. Personally, I prefer authenticity in languages, but I’m willing to submit to a film asking the viewer to suspend disbelief with the awareness that the language being spoken on screen is not the actual language in which the characters are conversing – we do that with translated books, so why not a film if it does not caricature the local people, if it means taking that story to an audience beyond its home base? This is how the world watched Gandhi and Schindler’s List, both English films set in decidedly non-English-speaking settings. Of course it is worth noting that in India this suspension of disbelief is rarely sought by filmmakers of languages other than Hindi. The problem with Wonder Women is different anyway. This film’s problem is its pretensions to authenticity. Set aside the awkward dialogue writing for a moment. A mixed group in Kerala may possibly speak the mix of languages shown here, but that does not explain the reasoning behind featuring non-Malayalam songs in the background.

It’s strange that Wonder Women has been made in a decade when Malayalam cinema has been earning nationwide audience acclaim for its rootedness, and when Telugu, Tamil and Kannada cinema have spawned pan-India blockbusters embraced by traditional Hindi film audiences. The irony is that Anjali’s best directorial ventures, Manjadikuru and Koode, are completely entrenched in the soil of the places in which they are set. Wonder Women, in contrast, feels like it belongs nowhere and is floating in some imaginary ether where everyone sounds fake. It is also dreary, hollow and shallow. Did the same Anjali Menon make all three films?

Rating: 1.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Wonder Women is streaming on SonyLIV

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial