Fatafati (Bengali, Now Running In Kolkata & Other Centres)
Rating: ***
Nobody dies in Fatafati, director Aritra Mukherjee’s take on the cringy culture of do-or-diet body contouring whereby women must not only watch the calories, they must starve themselves, if needed, to fit into their Size 0 clothes.
Ritabhari Chakraborty, laden with those extra pounds to play the housewife Phullora, is at once the victim and the dreamer who tailors beautiful blouses while her outspoken but not mean mother-in-law smirks, “What is the point making beautiful blouses when you can’t wear them?”
This brings us to the other point which the film so pointedly raises: do women have to be of a particular shape and size to wear beautiful clothes?
All this could have been much more effective had the narrative avoided exaggerations. Regrettably every edifying idea is over-punctuated , every good deed done is douched in silent applause.
In yet another restrained and effective performance Abir Chatterjee plays the supportive “liberal” husband who encourages his repressed wife to flower into her own.
Abir’s “nobility” has a certain retro-mobility. He will remind you of many such liberal men from the past Bengali cinema including Soumitra Chatterjee in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata.
Abir plays Bachaspati,a salesperson in a clothes store who counts pennies , loves his wife and is largehearted enough to “allow” her to do what she likes.
The fatshaming theme is peppered with some raucous women’s kitty-party sequences where every shapeless housewife comes with her own woes and laughs them off with fish fry and tea.
At times one gets the feeling that the director is trying to cram in too of his “liberalism” into a lightweight film. There is a particularly awful sequence where the slim diet-friendly bomb next door(Swastika Dutta) humiliates Phullora in public . The sequence goes on and on with each passing jibe hitting an embarassing offkey note.
By the time Phullora triumphs all prejudice on the ramp the film seems like propaganda for plus-size clothes, albeit in the guise of an elegantly set up fairytale that offends none, not even bodyshamers.
By the way, do you know of any autorickshaw driver who refuses a passenger for being overweight? Fatafati gives us this weirdo who should be shamed for such low-level bodyshaming.
