Heroine: Did It Age Well?

If Luck By Chance was a love letter to the Hindi film industry, then Heroine is hate mail. Twelve years have passed since its release, so let’s ask my favorite question: Did it age well? This Kareena Kapoor starrer was Madhur Bhandarkar’s fourth (perhaps fifth?) iteration of the “woman becomes wise to the ruthless nature of the industry she works in” template. And hear me out, when you put all his films together, they do make the point he set out to make.

The Impact of Capitalism on Women

Capitalism ruins lives, especially for women and children, no matter what setting or profession one explores. Chandni Bar, Page 3, Corporate, Traffic Signal, Fashion, Heroine, and their decidedly poor cousin Calendar Girls are all stories of exploitation. But the way I see it, the quality of storytelling deteriorated as he moved down the line. It’s the self-referencing and cornering himself into the stereotypes he normalized that leave no space for novelty.

Repeated Tropes in Bhandarkar’s Filmography

We’ve seen the woman “corrupted” by alcohol and drugs in Bhandarkar films before. We have seen their affairs with married men. We’ve seen manipulation, shallow insecurities, and emotional outbursts. These hyper-specific tropes turn Bhandarkar’s filmography into a Russian nesting doll simulation. Each time you open one up, the one inside looks the same, just smaller. But it can also lead to a surprising result: CAMP!

A Sapphic Role and Over-the-Top Storytelling

Gather around my girls, gays, and theys, because this is Kareena Kapoor’s only sapphic(-ish) role to date. That might have been enough to forgive Bhandarkar on its own, but sone pe suhaga—the film is actually so over-the-top that it crosses into the bizarre. There’s truth at the core, but the film revels in artifice. It is meta but also like a street play. It has multiple queer characters but also likes to point at a bisexual person occasionally just to say, “Haw! Scandalous!” I wish Madhur Bhandarkar would meet some regular queer people at some point so he can snap out of his narrow view. But watching a gay character say, “Okay bro,” to the bisexual man giving him a thumbs up after they’ve just slept together? Now that’s camp.

The Campiness of Heroine’s Performance

The campiness is further apparent when you think about Kareena Kapoor as a star IRL trying to play a mediocre actor Mahi Arora. When Mahi is trying to ace her scenes with sincerity in the film, you are left wondering if Kareena as a real person was trying her darndest to make it an award-winning performance too? And if so, her sincerity is very funny in the context of her one-note performance in Heroine. The thought throws you for a loop and contributes to the film being so bad it’s now… good.

Susan Sontag’s Perspective on Camp

In Notes on “Camp” published in 1964, Susan Sontag says, “In naïve or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness—a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.” I think Heroine fits that description to a T.

Conclusion: Heroine – Did It Age Well?

To determine if Heroine has aged well, one must decide whether to take it seriously at all in the first place. If the answer is yes, Heroine was obviously boring and dated in 2012 and remains so. But if you decide to watch it as a parody of a parody of a parody, you join the likes of me. And I just want to watch Kareena Kapoor leap off a styrofoam buffalo!

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