Laaga Chunari Mein Daag - Journey of a Woman (2007)

A fascinating blend of musical, melodrama and feminist fairy tale, "Laaga Chunari Mein Daag" shows Bollywood’s moral universe in transition.

The film follows the fortunes of Badki (Rani Mukherjee) and Chutki (Konkona Sen Sharma), sisters from a Benares family with money problems and predatory relatives.

Father is an honest employee who refuses to sign false documents and thus is deprived of his pension – the sole source of income for the family. Family consists of one wife and two daughters. Mother takes over and makes both ends meet by sewing petticoats. Father, in the mean time, buys lottery tickets ..and wastes money basically – this kind of gambling is I guess alright for the otherwise honest man – this means he is a loser as a man and as a husband – for he is of no help to his wife.

When Badki leaves to find work in Bombay (as everyone in the film still calls the sin city currently known as Mumbai), “Laaga” really takes off.

Badki decides to go to Bombay to fetch some financial support for her family. She tries her luck in Beauty parlors – leaves it for maybe she finds it below her dignity to sweep floors and do pedicure for customers, joins a departmental store but is ousted for she could not understand or speak English !Tries to become a movie assistant but one has to move ones butt real fast – so she is kicked out from there as well.

At last she reaches a Call Center and happens to met a debauch married male who promises to give her the job if she agrees to sleep with him ! She rings up her mother – who is very busy running helter-skelter collecting money to attend to her hubby’s sudden heart attack. His heart is attacked upon hearing that they will have to vacate the house by the way. Badki tells her mother that she wants to come back for the people here in Bombay are very cheap – but her mother denies and says that she had better not come back and ask her for money instead.

There, Badki — with no diploma and no skills — becomes Natasha: a high-priced prostitute. The movie isn’t coy about this. “I’ve fallen from grace,” she says. “I can never come back.” But she manages to make a lot of money, paying for her family's expenses, sister's education, furnishing their house in Benares, and all of a sudden they became so rich.

Thus she makes a whole lot of money and starts sending it to her parents – only her mother knows what she is doing, her father and sister are blissfully unaware of her business. Only an absolute dumb idiot will not realize this – which her father probably was - for its not possible for a non-english speaking, unsmart woman to earn such exorbitantly high amount of money in a matter of a couple of months!

Chutki’s story is lighter. M.B.A. in hand, she joins her sister in the city, where she gets a job in advertising. Her first task is to sell Lux soap to the modern Indian woman. And who is that creature? As her boss (and future husband) discovers, Chutki herself — bright, spunky, self-assured — fits the bill.

Badki, on the other hand, meets a guy – another rich Industrialist – who falls for her. In the last scene , that guy proposes Badki but she tells him that she is a Prostitute. He says that he knows it from day one but it does not really matter to him. Wow!!

One day, Chutki finds out what her sister is doing, she is so furious with herself and sad for not being able to save her sister. She asks for Badki's apology. It is a very emotional moment when two of them cry for forgiveness. Chutki won’t allow her sister to be shunned. Instead of keeping the stain a dark secret, Chutki insists on honesty and that the family reintegrate Badki.

Ms. Sharma hits all the right notes as Chutki, the film’s conscience and clown. Through her, “Laaga” rejects tragedy and embraces its musical comedy heart. The Hindi title — literally “a stain on my veil” — means “fallen woman.” But here Badki gets back up, becoming, with her sister, that special thing: the modern Indian woman.

I think that this movie is a portrayal of a reality. It shows to us why most women become prostitutes, and they are only human. But what is mostly shown is the power of forgiveness, how fallen women actually can come back if they want to come back.

This movie is a good Hindi movie, not two thumbs up but good. ***