Director Madhur Bhandarkar is back in theatres, with a familiar song whose chorus goes, “People in big cities can be bad and bad things can happen to people who are inherently good.” Throughout his career, from his multiple-National-Award-winning Chandni Bar (2001) to Heroine (2012), the filmmaker has constantly relied upon these words to guide him through screenplays that start out exploring different kinds of worlds, but somehow all end up the same.
So here we go again with Calendar Girls, a film that looks at one year in the life of five models who pose for a glamourous calendar shoot. The references are obvious and the movie even has Suhel Seth playing a version of liquor baron Vijay Mallya. And yes, any similarity with the similarly named 2003 British comedy starring Helen Mirren as one of several middle-aged women who pose for a nude calendar is purely accidental.
Working without a mainstream lead actor or actress for the first time in many releases, Bhandarkar attempts to lend some diversity to his lead characters. So, we have Sharon Pinto (Kyra Dutt) from Goa, Nandita Menon (Aakanksha Puri) from Hyderabad, Paroma Ghosh (Satarupa Pyne) from Kolkata, Naazneen Malik (Avani Modi) from Lahore, and Mayuri Chauhan (Ruhi Singh) from Rohtak. Of these, Dutt has actually been a real-life calendar girl, while Puri and Modi come with acting experience from the South Indian and Gujarati film industries respectively.
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