Queen Review:Kangana Ranaut delivers a knockout performance

Film review: Queen

The women are unstoppable. In Dedh Ishqiya, the lasses wisely chose each other over men, while Highway was about a girl who decided to grow up and shape her own life, even if it meant distancing herself from family. Vikas Bahl's Queen gives us a female protagonist our films deserve more often, one we find ourselves sympathising with, rooting for, and finally cheering on.

Queen also gives us an actor whose gumption and fearlessness deserves applause. Kangana Ranaut takes on the central character's insecurities, her doubts and her victories, and makes them her own. She delivers a knockout performance - one that raises the bar for female artistes in the Hindi film industry, by opting for realism over vanity and grit over glamour. She owes a great deal to Bahl, Chaitally Parmar and Parveez Shaikh's screenplay (with dialogues by Anvita Dutt and Ranaut) about a spurned woman embarking on a journey of self-discovery and redemption.

Ranaut plays Rani, a small-town belle obsessed with the idea of getting married. The film opens with her family preparing for her wedding, while Rani expresses excitement and trepidation about her life ahead through a charming voiceover. "How will my first night be?" "He's put on a little bit of weight since he returned from London, but he looks so good!"

As Amit Trivedi's foot-tapping (and persistently splendid) music soars in the background, the camera focuses on the mother who's overcome with sentiment, the grandmother who's barely able to contain her happiness, and the father and brother, who dance with joy. So many hopes, so many dreams, all of which come crashing when Rani's fiance Vijay announces he isn't willing to settle down with her anymore.

"You won't be able to adjust to my lifestyle," says the London-returned dude by way of explanation, struggling with his accent but somehow pretending to appear cool. A flashback shows us the boy being smitten with the girl, but the time spent abroad seems to have altered his tastes. Rajkummar Rao plays Vijay with perception - he's never looking to outshine his co-actor, choosing instead to remain the well-oiled part that keeps the whole running.

The attention is in the details, and Bahl knows that. In the scene where Vijay breaks the news to Rani, the camera lingers on the girl's hand, proudly displaying the freshly-applied mehndi, as it tries to grasp the boy's hand that moves away out of frame. When she wakes up in a daze after having locked herself in a room for over a day without food, Rani absently reaches for the box of sweets lying around, and stuffs a big, round piece in her mouth. It makes you laugh, that little moment, even as you feel terrible about her condition. That happens often in the film - humour springs up in the unlikeliest of places, making you chuckle and then instantly feel a stronger emotion. The film's designed to be funny without being obvious about it, and Bahl's surefooted direction and Ranaut's pitch-perfect performance ensure the effort does not show.

Rooted as it is in reality, Queen takes certain liberties - those you hope and secretly believe are plausible. The girl, who had so looked forward to her honeymoon in Paris and Amsterdam, goes ahead as planned, without the boy. It starts off as an action springing out of grief. "Mujhe apne honeymoon pe jaana hai," she says to her parents, who are willing to let their daughter enjoy her flight of fancy if it helps her deal with the agony. It seems like an impulsive, foolish decision, one she begins to regret on landing up in Paris. But what is it that a little alcohol cannot fix? A drunken night out gets the ball rolling, as Rani begins to discover feelings she didn't know existed.

The brilliance of Queen lies in its subtlety. The film is essentially a feel-good tale about triumphing against the odds, and utilises all possible tropes you'd associate with similar films (English Vinglish, for example), but does so with a slight flourish. The writing is consistently witty. Even in its more indulgent moments, it's the humour that pulls the film through. Rani's transformation is patiently etched out. In the end, she's more-or-less the same woman she was at the beginning of the story, only with a broader world view and better equipped to deal with life's vagaries.

The film's been made with meticulous collaboration - the costume (Manoshi Nath and Rushi Sharma), production design (Vintee Bansal and Namra Parikh), cinematography (the late Bobby Singh and Siddharth Diwan) and editing (Abhijit Kokate and Anurag Kashyap) departments are completely in sync with the director's vision. The acting is overall good, the ensemble coming together strongly behind Ranaut.

Queen is a consistently funny and heart-warming film made of little gems, Kangana Ranaut being the brightest, biggest jewel of the piece. Shine on, you crazy diamond.