A mid-size town in Middle India. Four feisty women dare to dream. To break the shackles of their inane, repressed lives. To give wings to their desires, to express their sexuality, to reimagine their lives and to seek their place under a free sun.
She lusts for the sinewy body of a young man, his touch may just breathe a new fire in her awakened body. She’s shamed but remains unapologetic, and one hopes, defiant. She fights to wear jeans and to live. And craves for a stairway to heaven. There’s a lady who’s sure “All that glitters is gold.”
She enjoys sex with abandon and dreams of making it big in a metropolitan Xanadu. She is a star salesgirl in disguise, bears the nightly assaults of an unfeeling husband with stoicism and yearns for tender love.
Do they all triumph in the end? Is their final denouement an act of resignation or rebellion? Life is not fantastical and the empathetic and brilliant director Alankrita Shrivastava provides no cinematic salvation, for life for women in India is no bed of roses.
In their beds, the sweaty, smelly, drunken pelvic thrusts of brutes pulverise them into submission. Night after remorseless night. Yet they dare to dream and one day will break free. One day.
Till that day, they will continue to wear lipstick under their burkhas.
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