Veere Di Wedding: Same Old Privileged Brat Woman As ‘Women Empowerment’?

Is Veere Di Wedding really about empowered women or just a very narrow slice of what single women in this country supposedly, want? 

I was forwarded the trailer of Veere Di Wedding over the weekend, and just now, a journalist called asking what I felt about this film and whether it was empowering for single women. Firstly, I don’t understand why every film on female bonhomie has to be a rip-off of the Sex And The City films, and why there has to be an over the top destination wedding by a bunch of upper class, privileged women in expensive designer clothes, quite like the erstwhile Sonam Kapoor starrer Aisha, which was the quintessential South Delhi, rich girl roundup, replete with couture clothing, plush homes, swanky sedans and a weak story line, that in the name of a woman oriented film, peddled a dumbed down version of a rich, immature spoilt brat who uses her girlfriends, bullies a poor, simpleton cousin and can’t make up her mind about her hot bod suitors.

Also, what’s with empowerment as projected in Bollywood under the guise of entertainment and the use of derogatory words like ‘behenchod/chuth’? I mean, isn’t the word itself a slur towards the very sex it aspires to set free free?

What’s funny about talking about the Hindi word for orgasm? This in a country where we don’t have any formal sex education, parents are rarely intimate with each other, where most women don’t even know where there G spot is, cannot say no when they are sexually uncomfortable, fake orgasms most of the times and are barely receiving any foreplay, being largely mute pleasure providers and procreators. Where marital rape is a sordid reality, and the Courts decree that it can’t be criminalized since sex for a wife is her legal and moral duty.

Balaji Productions which produced Dirty Picture and with a strong penchant for bold (that labelling itself means sleazy), I fear, makes the same mistake again, by making female strength flimsy and showing women’s independence only through the narrow prism of a woman turning down a wedding proposal. Or her friend on the verge of divorce and not wanting to cook rajma chawal. This in a country where divorce rates are staggering, and where women just to settle down by a certain age and thanks to the rampant pressure and premium of ‘virginity’ still, are opting for vaginal aesthetic surgeries like hymen reconstruction that have escalated 30% in the past five years.

Sadly, Veere Di Wedding did not impress me. It’s fake, fuzzy in its messaging of freedom and a woman’s life choices, has the most slapstick, sexist lines ever, and sticks to the transcript that what women in this country want is casual sex, smoking, parties, fancy clothes and holidays, no domestic responsibilities.

Having interviewed 3000 single women for Status Single, I think 74 million single women have much more interesting lives and journeys.

So, my answer to the scribe.
‘I’m going to skip this story! And this movie.’

Image via movie promos