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3 days ago | 
thevoiceoffashion.com | J. Shruti |Shefalee Vasudev |Shweta Shiware |Kahini Calcuttawalla
Carter’s Afrocentric ApproachFor Black Panther, which was set in a fictional uncolonised kingdom, Carter summoned Afrofuturism, drawing on colour symbolism of the Maasai people, Samurai armour and the jewellery of Nbedele women. An international team of researchers, including buyers, tailors, beaders as well as engineers, undertook the task, exploring not only clothing histories but also new technological possibilities, such as 3D printing.
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2 weeks ago | 
thevoiceoffashion.com | J. Shruti |Shefalee Vasudev |Shweta Shiware |Kahini Calcuttawalla
Here, edited excerpts from a conversation with Mandhwani. Women were both reading and writing for these magazines, both fiction and non-fiction. It feels like they weren't being pushed toward an ideal of who they should be, but were simply allowed to be. It’s not that women didn’t read earlier. There was already a vibrant culture of publications and books in Hindi and even more so in Urdu, engaging women readers.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | J. Shruti |Ilangovan Rajasekaran |Vaishna Roy
Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon features a supportive wife, Shabeena (Muskkaan Jaferi), who is winking at the audience for her clarity and agency. You see her court a man, Nasir (Adarsh Gourav), considered a no-gooder initially, and has his heart on another beautiful woman whose family flings doubts upon his ability to move upwards, socio-economically. Inevitably, that relationship fails, and inevitably, he ends up with Shabeena.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | J. Shruti |Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay |Vaishna Roy
Homi Adajania’s Cocktail (2012) was a rip in Hindi cinema. In the film, the actor Deepika Padukone’s Veronica, a spoilt brat, takes in Meera (Diana Penty) who was abandoned by her husband after he married her under false pretences. Here was a woman who wore her sexual desire and her brattiness on her sleeve—a mixture not to alienate her from the viewers, but to humanise her.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
filmcompanion.in | J. Shruti
Karan Johar’s Rani Chatterjee (Alia Bhatt) from Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) is a no-nonsense, puts-misogynistic-politicians-in-their- place kind of a journalist. She is also very sexy. Her introduction shot shows her working on her laptop, wearing a slinky little robe, sipping coffee. Then come the money shots of Rani getting dressed — putting on a blouse that plunges deep and is held in place by a delicate strip of fabric and tassels that bob with mischievous playfulness.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
filmcompanion.in | J. Shruti
Hindi cinema, historically speaking, despite some of its roots in courtesan culture, has a poor record of allotting its female characters economic self-sufficiency. The representation is fraught with corrosive contradictions that pit her efforts at building a community against her economic pursuit, and suggest there is a scarcity that the woman will have to make peace with eventually. At times, the job is also more of an aberration rather than a concerted life-long pursuit.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
filmcompanion.in | J. Shruti
Rai proliferated every Indian living room with a fizzle. “I said you have to seduce five men in this room,” Prahlad Kakkar recalled in an interview, on the direction he gave Rai during the famous Pepsi advertisement that marked her arrival on the Indian entertainment scene. She appeared in wet, tousled hair; a distinctive red lipstick that contrasted with her green eyes, and seductively asked Aamir Khan’s character if there was one more Pepsi bottle.
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
filmcompanion.in | J. Shruti
In the 2023 The Color Purple — a musical directed by Blitz Bazawule, and based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name — we have Sofia (Danielle Brooks) kick open a door, and impetuously tell a bar owner that she only reads what she likes when he points to a sign disclosing women are not allowed inside the premises.
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
filmcompanion.in | J. Shruti
It is a privilege to see Emma Stone espouse a character whose foetus-brain and deadpan candour undoes exploitative men and their encrypted sexism with the ease of removing a glove. In director Yorgos Lanthimos’s , a wacky, tweaked Frankenstein with feminist overtones — Bella Baxter (Stone) is an adult woman resurrected with the brain of her unborn child by surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
filmcompanion.in | J. Shruti
During the making of Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — Justine Triet’s crisp courtroom drama about a woman being tried for the murder of her husband — Sandra Hüller repeatedly nudged Triet to spill if Sandra (the character) was actually culpable. (This is Hüller and Triet’s second collaboration after Sibyl (2019).) Triet refused to clarify, leaving it to the actor to arrive at her own vantage point. If this left Hüller at a loss, you won’t spot any troubling ambiguity in her performance.
