Shakuntala Devi
director – Anu Menon
To emit – Vidya Balan, Sanya Malhotra, Amit Sadh, Jisshu Sengupta
Shakuntala Devi lives as if laughing. She tilts her head back and unleashes a full throat laugh; his is a laugh and is often heard in the biographical film of 2 hours and 10 minutes. Even when she doesn’t laugh, the expression on her face suggests she is joking.
As a braided math genius, she would have understood the value of humor from the start. Shakuntala had a strange ability to make numbers dance. As a child, she was participating in math shows, supporting her family by answering difficult questions.
Watch the Shakuntala Devi trailer here
Even in a field as crowded as genius biographies, finding one in a woman who knows how to live is rare. The geniuses who obtain their own biographies are tortured, enigmatic, and mostly men. Their value is often recognized long after they are gone. Shakuntala Devi from Vidya Balan does not check any of these boxes. She likes her saris, the attention, and her transcontinental lifestyle.
Shakuntala Devi, the film, dramatizes the life of the math magician whose bold contours are public knowledge. A girl whose talent for math was identified at an early age, Shakuntala supplemented her family’s waning resources by doing math shows from an early age. A fierce feminist before she perhaps knew the word, Shakuntala lived life on her own terms.
After shooting a lover who tries to trick her, she is sent to the UK, where her first love, mathematics, once again rescues her. A Spanish man named Javier teaches him English and the way of life in Europe, as he finds fame as the ‘human computer’, and finally makes his way in the Guinness Book of Records. She marries an IAS officer named Paritosh (Jisshu Sengupta) but fails to find a balance between math and motherhood. Her irritable relationship with her daughter Anu (Sanya Malhotra), who wants a ‘normal’ life, forms the main conflict in the film.
Vidya Balan and Sanya Malhotra in a frame from Shakuntala Devi.
With so many things for the girl with pigtails, it’s a shame that the film never risked, happy to continue with the same constructs that Shakuntala despised. The film feels functional, in a race to tell us the full story of her life while skipping the great strokes that made real life Shakuntala Devi a woman ahead of her time.
It is shown chapter after chapter, giving you as much satisfaction as turning the pages of your NCERT math textbook, despite the detailed set design and focus on period-specific costumes. The sepia tint of her childhood in poverty blends into the lush colors of her youth in the UK without the viewer really having a clue about her life.
Nayanika Mehtani’s script, co-written by director Anu Menon, Shakuntala Devi feels bland. The most important relationships in his life, especially with the men he loved, are explained in expository dialogues. Paritosh and Javier receive the kind of treatment generally reserved for women in Hindi cinema: they just got there without much arc, with perhaps a song. Even something as important as Shakuntala, author of a book on homosexuality in India in 1977, is overlooked. in a scene that causes chills.
Shakuntala Devi really focuses on only two relationships in the lives of its protagonists: with mathematics and their daughter Anu, and even they become short, with emotions lost in the exhibition.
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Vidya Balan brings a sense of vitality to Shakuntala, the math genius who was a rock star at heart. Shakuntala is another addition to the long line of free-thinking, independent women who populate her filmography. Sanya is competent, but doesn’t match her most illustrious co-star, especially when it comes to scenes of mother-daughter conflict. Both Jisshu and Amit Sadh, who plays Anu’s husband Abhaya, are charming and solid. Amit gets what is perhaps the most developed male role in the film and does him justice.
In defense of the film, it is not a hagiography. Shakuntala is not perfect. She has her imperfections like the rest of us. The film seems to be in a hurry to get from point A to point B, like a standard biographical film from the cradle to the grave. A woman who never really understood the meaning of the word ‘normal’, Shakuntala Devi now gets a biographical film that can only be described that way.
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The author tweets @ JSB17
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