Flashback Films: Rani Mukerji’s Mardaani Gets Everything Right Except Its Title

Flashback Films: Rani Mukerji’s Mardaani Gets Everything Perfect, Except the Title

MardanReleased on August 22, 2014, it is as close to a badass, female-led film as we can expect from Bollywood. The film showed Rani Mukerji as the tough cop Shivani Shivaji Roy, who will stop at nothing to catch the mastermind behind a child trafficking mafia terrorizing Delhi. Rani is exactly the fiery, brash and motivated cop you expect her to be, isn’t she? Does the audience expect and accept a female cop who does everything men do, without a deep backstory to propel her revenge saga or a sob story that leaves her ultimately triumphant but emotionally unstable? The critical and commercial success of Mardan says we’re ready, or rather were, for that storyline. So where does this near-perfect film fail?

Shivani Shivaji Roy takes on the villain, a young, unassuming and cruel Walt, played by the chillingly cunning Tahir Raj Bhasin head-on. She challenges him, angers him, chases him, falters a bit, reaches him, catches him, and ultimately wins the high-stakes game of cat and mouse that the two seem to be playing throughout the film. And amidst all the swag and style and chase, the horrific reality of child trafficking is not lost. The subject matter surprisingly makes up a large part of the plot, rather than delving deeply into the protagonist’s seemingly sad backstory, which is usually the case in most female-led films where the leading lady is a tough girl. After all, only a personal tragedy can transform a woman from vulnerable to “manly,” right? Mardan does not use that caricature.

But despite all the positive and pleasant changes the film brings, it fails to attribute everything to the assumption that all the qualities that make Shivani the brilliant cop she is are masculine qualities. No, Shivani Shivaji Roy is not Mardan. She is as feminine as a woman can be. She has empathy, she has an intuition that rarely betrays her, she has an unflinching courage and above all she knows what it is like for those trafficked girls who lose their youth to crimes that have no place in such young lives. No, Shivani Shivaji Roy is not Mardanshe is a brave woman and that is what the film is about.

While the film is a lot of fun to watch, it sometimes feels better to look past the title and pretend that it doesn’t fall back on the assumption that everything a woman does well is only suitable for a man. Mardaani breaks with the stereotypes we associate with films of this genre, but doesn’t reach a point where it’s unacceptable to think that the ultimate praise for a woman is to be compared to a man.