Not enough girl power?

Sonakshi Sinha’s latest film Akira seems to have garnered approval, both with the critics and at the box office. This is the latest in a line of films created with a woman protagonist in mind to have received a positive response. Earlier in the year, Sonam Kapoor won the award for best actress for Neerja at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne while Deepika’s role in Piku, which released in 2015, won her accolades.

Despite the rave reviews, however, Akira brought in just Rs 5.5 crore on day one at the box office, and films like Neerja, Piku and Sarbjit, also started off at a snail’s pace. These films had to rely on word of mouth for the numbers to pick up. That’s not the case for a Salman Khan or a Shah Rukh Khan starrer, which usually touch the Rs100-crore mark within the first three days. In this day and age, when there is a growing appreciation for women of substance, is the Indian audience still skeptical about women-centric films?

Neeraj Ghaywan, director of Masaan, says that continual focus on the male hero has made it difficult for audiences to take women-centric films seriously. He says, “This has to do with the deeply rooted patriarchy of our society. Traditionally, we have been groomed into thinking that men are the heroes. So one doesn’t take a film seriously unless there is a male star as the towering figure. That’s what the audience believes, or at least that’s what the makers think the audience believes.”

Director of Mary Kom, Omung Kumar also senses a bias towards male-dominated films. He says, “The audience today knows that films will keep screening for a while. So, they think that they will catch the women-centric films later on. This results in poor openings.”

Sanyukta Chawla Shaikh, who wrote the dialogues for Sonam Kapoor’s Neerja, believes that there are quite a few factors at play, and starts right from when the films go on floors. For instance, while films with Shah Rukh and Salman are made on a lavish scale of, for instance, Rs 100-crore budgets, women-centric films need to work within a tight financial plan.

“Movies such as Kahaani, Queen and even Akira were made on smaller budgets as compared to movies with Salman Khan or SRK. An SRK movie is made with Rs 100 crore and makes Rs 100 crore. The difference between how much a movie costs and how much it earns makes a difference too,” she observes.

A poster for the film Piku

Praveen Sattaru, the maker of Guntur Talkies has a different opinion. “Why this craze over ‘women-centric’ films now? There’ve been films with women as the lead ever since the camera was invented. Back then, films were not men or women-centric, they were character and story-centric. If a Salman or a Shah Rukh movie is making Rs 100 crore within a few days, it is because of their star power; not because they are males.”

Sanyukta also believes that doing away with the tag of “women-centric film” could help improve the box office figures. “If you give the audiences a good story, they will go watch it. The stories need to be treated the same way as any other movie, instead of tagging them as female oriented stories. There should be a set of standard parameters for the story, where you see a movie for what it is,” she says.

Omung, too, is hopeful. “In one or two years, things will change as filmmakers now want to produce female-centric films and even the stars are waiting to take up such roles,” he adds.
— With inputs from Pooja Salvi