Hello Kitty

Two women stuck in a Noida state of mind try to break free in this new film on Netflix

September 25, 2020 12:23 pm | Updated September 26, 2020 04:00 pm IST

Illustration: Mihir Balantrapu

Illustration: Mihir Balantrapu

Popular films and literature deal with a false dichotomy between ‘mass’ themes and ‘female’ themes, with the latter often locked into overtly feminist or rom-com boxes expected to attract only female interest. Given these rigid compartments, new Hindi cinema’s light-hearted and entirely ‘mass’ focus on middle-class women and their desires, both sexual and material, is a breath of fresh air. Netflix release Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare from writer-director Alankrita Srivastava (of Lipstick Under My Burkha fame) is the latest in a series that memorably includes Suresh Triveni’s Tumhari Sulu.

Dolly Kitty… builds upon a theme used in the 2019 film Dream Girl, which too was centred on a cell centre catering to lonely men. Only there, it was the male protagonist who landed the job because of his ability to speak in a falsetto, which meant not only that the focus stayed firmly on the hero but also that the real women in these centres continued to be outside the pale of storytelling interest.

This film has no such qualms. When Kajal becomes Kitty for the call centre, her first sexy-romantic chat makes her nauseous but she soon embraces her task with aplomb. Her reasons for liking her new job are equally interesting — she quits a leather factory because the supervisor treats her as less than human, whereas here, in a seedier job, her personal worth is appreciated, a nuancing that’s rare in pop culture. Kajal has refused marriage, left her small town in Bihar, and come to Greater Noida on Delhi’s outskirts to earn a living. Her delight when she throws herself on ‘her’ bed (in a shared room in a ladies’ hostel) is the sheer joy of personal space, the Woolfian ‘room of one’s own’.

The joy is sweeter because it also means she doesn’t have to face her brother-in-law’s pawing. Later too, when Kajal realises she has unknowingly accompanied her colleague for a paid sex gig, she runs away. Yet, this is the same Kajal-Kitty who has to sweet-talk male callers into sexual gratification, a job that gets these women called randi or prostitutes. Not only is the film saying that sex callers needn’t be sex workers, it’s also saying that all women, regardless of their profession, are entitled to choose who they sleep with. Thus, Kajal’s cousin Dolly is frigid with her husband but when she chooses her lover, she is fine.

Srivastava’s systematic dismantling of middle-class morality is a bold move under a political dispensation that unhealthily obsesses over supposed sanskari values, represented in the movie by the now inevitable and ominous moral-policing, saffron-waving gang, but the film’s greater significance is possibly its accurate identification of the enormous sexual frustration and loneliness that plagues Indian society, a frustration that clearly begets the recent rise in gratuitous violence, the hankering for older patriarchal hierarchies, and the extreme fixation with religion.

Equally, the film traces the financial frustration unleashed by a relentless neoliberalism. Dolly pawns jewellery and even dips into her office’s petty cash box to buy clothes, baubles, an air-conditioner. The glitzy mall, Dolly’s crowded, kitschy flat, the fancier phone for which Shazia will change lovers — it’s a world forever beckoning with its bigger-better-more mantra; a siren call that women can succumb to as unapologetically as men and for which they needn’t be judged. The film conveys this constant middle-class anxiety to reach the next richer, posher rung and yet, interestingly, it’s not money that buys Dolly and Kitty freedom but their decision to shrug off bourgeois value systems, in effect suggesting that women are imprisoned more by the patriarchy than by the economy.

Dolly Kitty… doesn’t pull off this storyline with great cinematic finesse, given its structural flaws and lazy scripting. Greater Noida is hardly a village for everyone to turn up at the same event in a final scene of Hardyesque coincidence. Everything is crammed in — sexual dysfunction, Muslim lover, gender-confused child, dishonest builder — until it finally culminates with a giant, all-too-obvious artwork.

Yet, showcasing that artwork and this theme is to take a stand today. Plotting the sexual and financial liberation of its protagonists from their claustrophobic middle-class mores while still locating them within that milieu is no small triumph. And, as cheesy as it is, one really must celebrate a mass movie that ends with a call centre established for lonely women!

Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.

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