Queen

There's a lot of talk - and not just with respect to Hindi films - about "strong" female characters. I like strong female characters as much as anyone - they make for good stories. But there are different kinds of strength. Rani comes from a Delhi Punjabi family, complete with (as my friend Karan Bali so excellently observed) the chubby little brother and bindaas grandmother that is becoming standard issue for such filmi families. But Rani is not loud and headstrong, like Parineeti Chopra in Ladies v. Ricky Bahl, or on a confidently planned path to independent success like Anushka Sharma in Band baaja baaraat. She is much more like Sridevi in English Vinglish, an understated woman of powerful untapped potential who at first believes she can be content with her small world and her small role in it. Queen is English Vinglish at a different time of life, and the difference matters: Queen says you do not have to pay decades of dues on the straight and narrow before earning the right to find out who you really are.

At the heart of Rani's strength is a magnificent gameness, rendered by both the script and by Ranaut with a perfect balance of boldness and caution. As Rani is confronted by new experiences - the permissiveness of French culture, the pounding beat of a night club, the prospect of three male roommates in an Amsterdam hostel - she greets each one first with fear and discomfort, and then relaxes into the flow, resolving at least to accept the new world order as it shifts and changes around her. I love this about Rani. She is not a wild child or a rebel - she is simply open to new ideas as they come to her. Kangana Ranaut delivers this with perfect pitch, her wide open face registering shades of shock, trepidation, and finally a plucky sort of surrender to whatever strange new experience is thrown at her. It is a treat to take these adventures with her. And while the film flirts with a number of cliches - the sheltered Indian girl traveling abroad, the moral laxity of foreigners, the strangeness of foreign cultures and foreign food, the first taste of alcohol - with each of these elements Queen leads you down the garden path, so that just when you fear it is about to lose its magical touch and invoke some hackneyed trope, it veers sharply, comically, and delightfully around the obstacle. It uses these elements well, to tell a piece of Rani's story, rather than leaning on them lamely, to make weak fun of foreigners.