Movie Review: Shakuntala Devi (Hindi)

A warm, frantic retelling of the world-renowned math genius Shakuntala Devi, director Anu Menon's dramatisation is consistently entertaining and emotionally charged, led by an exceptional Vidya Balan, who impressively captures the larger-than-life, flamboyant personality of the eponymous character with an infectious enthusiasm. A woman with a bundle of talents, Devi was feisty, endearing, awe-inspiring and all that and more, and under Menon's fine balancing act, the film straddles her globe-trotting mathematical adventures and her strained relationship with her daughter (Sanya Malhotra as Anupama Banerji) with élan, while also driving home the conflict between who she is (a number-crunching celebrity) and who she should be (an ideal mother). "Do women stop having brains after becoming mothers?," she even asks at one point.

The constant jumps between hemispheres, timeframes and costumes makes the non-linear narrative appear more complicated than what it is (that both Shakuntala and Anu find out their mothers cared about them through old scrapbooks is a little hard to swallow), but the film is a spirited, warts-and-all portrait that doesn't shy away from showing her grey sides, recounting the story of an unconventional woman who wanted to live life on her own terms unabashedly, sometimes to the point of causing people closest to her considerable pain. It's about a Human Computer who realises she is "human" after all, that she doesn't have to be perfect at everything she does and that not every problem in life has a clean solution. Maths may be simple, but it's the human relationships that have difficult equations.