TAKE TWO

Kiran Rao on her second film, new production company, brides who go missing and find themselves, and her modern divorce with Aamir Khan

- NAMRATA ZAKARIA

It has been 13 years since her last film release, but Kiran Rao has proved to be worth the wait. Her second film as director, Laapataa Ladies, releases on March 1 and has already won a standing ovation at September’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Rao, 50, says it’s just the kind of response she needed after not showing a film to an audience for over 10 years. “I was nervous,” she says of the Toronto screenings. “A lot of the film’s humour is in its dialect, in its cadence of writing. Plus Bhojpuri is such a sweet language, I wasn’t sure how all of this would translate via subtitles and we would lose the rural flavour. This was a paying audience, so I felt very validated.”

We are sitting at an office of Aamir Khan Productions in Mumbai’s Bandra. The same building houses Khan and his extended family. The film has just been privately screened for THE WEEK and we are probably the first people outside the office to have watched it. It’s an endearing tale of two brides getting swapped on a train in rural India, only to discover themselves and their personal goals, all along questioning their misleading veils, patriarchy, and dropping empowerment quips and tips. It stars newbies Pratibha Ranta, Nitanshi Goel and Sparsh Srivastav in lead roles, along with Ravi Kishan.

“When Aamir first told me about the story, I thought the hook was delicious,” Rao lets in. The film is based on a screenplay writer Biplab Goswami had submitted in a competition where Khan was a judge. “In a sense it is a coming-of-age film, with a little mystery about how things would unfold. I read the story and I thought the women characters could be developed a little more. It could have been a dark film, but we wanted it to be more of a fun comedy,” she says.