Bollywood has come a long way now, gone are those days when female directors made films about female protagonists. Janaki Vishwanathan's protagonist is neither man nor woman.
Film: "Yeh Hai Bakrapur"
Cast: Anshuman Jha, Asif Basra, Suruchi Aulakh, and Yoshika Verma
Writer-Director: Janaki Vishwanathan
Rating: ***
Bollywood has come a long way now, gone are those days when female directors made films about female protagonists. Janaki Vishwanathan's protagonist is neither man nor woman.
It's a goat!
Weaving a plot in and around the anointment of a goat in a sleepy bigoted Muslim-dominated hamlet, Janaki's film creates a world that seems frozen in a state of incredulous backwardness and poverty. And yet "Yeh Hai Bakrapur" is not a sad film.
The upbeat tongue-in-cheek plot about a goat named, ahem, Shah Rukh who acquires a divine status for no fault of its own, has plenty of bite and brio. Though it finally comes to an inglorious ambiguous end, there is ample meat in the narrative to chew on.
