In a very emotional scene, what’s most important is the setting, and that’s the brilliance of the writing of Janhvi Kapoor and Pankaj Tripathi’s Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl…
Sharan Sharma’s Gunjan Saxena rests a lot on the relationship between Janhvi Kapoor’s (@janhvikapoor) Gunjan and Pankaj Tripathi’s (@pankajtripathi) Anup Saxena (Papa). Their relationship is the driving force of the film and it is their chemistry that one really needs to look out for. It’s perhaps the writing of these characters and how the relationship has been written which makes it what it is.
In a very significant scene in the film, we see Gunjan heart broken by gender politics at work and has hence returned home. She attends her best friend’s wedding and tells her father that it may be a good time to get married, settle down. Devastated, her father takes her to the kitchen and asks her to make parathas. She doesn’t know how to. He then tells her how choosing to marry has made all the effort both of them put in to make her a pilot futile. Gunjan too doesn’t want to get married, but she’s conditioned and made to believe by the world outside of her that home is the place for women. They aren’t needed at the workplace – an office or the Indian Air Force.
The dialogues in this scene are simple but thought provoking. The expressions by both the actors are top-notch too. But the brilliance of this scene lies in its setting. This conversation takes place in the kitchen – a supposed area of female expertise. This is a woman’s office – that’s what this scene tells us. And also that if a woman can run a house, she can use a rifle as well as any other man.
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