There is one factor in common between last week’s release Tadap and the film to be released this week Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui. They both feature very unusual heroines.
In Tadap Tara Sutaria plays the kind of sexually spirited scheming go-getter that only the notorious vamps played in the past.Her role has shades of super-vamp Bindu’s roles in B R Ishara’s Prem Shastra and B R Chopra’s Dastaan in the 1970s.
In Abhishek Kapoor’s Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui Vani Kapoor is cast as transgender girl in relationship with a cisgender.
In both the cases the heroine is seen doing things that she never dreamt of in the past: asserting her female identity in ways that do not necessarily suit the men around, and even , gulp, having premarital sex.
Raveena Tandon who plays a strong self-dependent female hero in Netflix’s Aranyak feel the days of the simpering Miss are over. “I’ve played my share of airheaded bimbos in the past, though even there I tried to find a core of substance in singing-dancing roles. The cop I play in Aranyak is far more rounded and representative of current times when women in our films are assigned far more substantial roles than earlier when they were either dancing or cooking, or both.”
Raveena’s Aranyak , Sushmita Sen’s Aarya and Vani Kapoor’s Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui open simultaneously this Friday on various platforms.