Review: Shabaash Mithu (2022)

Right off the bat, Shabaash Mithu tells the story of a remarkable woman in a very formulaic way, wherein the makers see the subject with a halo and the others in muted shades. The film’s poster tells us that it is the “untold story of women in blue”, however, the film focuses only on one woman, and that too, partially.

Mithali Durai Raj, the former captain of the Indian woman’s cricket team is one of the highest run-scorer in women’s international cricket. She captained the national side twice and has an unending list of records to her name. The film tells her journey and uses it to highlight the hardship and uphill battle that is women's cricket in India.

The film, written by Priya Aven and directed by Srijit Mukherjee is a formulaic sports biopic, wherein the makers see the subject with a halo and the others in muted shades. Taapsee Pannu plays Raj with great caliber. However, in creating a niche for herself, she is almost ‘generalized’ in every sports film, and more recently, having them lined up back to back- from Soorma, Rashmi Rocket, Loop Lapetta to now this.

Taapsee Pannu in a still from the film.

The first and most memorable leg of Shabaash Mithu is the initial setup. We are introduced to young Mithali Raj, played by the ever-memorable Inayat Varma, and the friendship she strikes with her friend Noori, played by the wonderful commanding Kasturi Jagnam. Noori introduces her to cricket, recognizes her talent, and enables her to become one of her best friends.

Aven’s screenplay keeps the cricket secondary and instead focuses on the touching friendship between two girls, for a considerable stretch, which is remarkable.

However, in a recent series of tweets, Raj was asked who her inspiration for cricket was, and she has not mentioned Noori at all. As a viewer, I would have loved to see more of Noori’s character. We are shown that she is married off (maybe being Muslim and young - a stereotype which was not needed at all) when Raj plays the selections, but the character unfortunately was not fleshed out entirely.

Inayat Verma plays the younger version of Mithali Raj in this biopic, which is a bland amalgamation of a complex legacy.

Another facet for me that was hard to digest was the timeline of the film. We are not told the age of Raj at all. In the beginning, we are told that Noori is of around 15 years, so we assume Raj must be of a similar age category. But however, as time progresses, Pannu plays Raj from her teenage self to the end, with almost no changes in makeup. Even her mother has not aged at all despite years.

The film overall follows a formulaic arc of a sports biopic. The film, which also talks about a celebration of women’s cricket, focuses only on ‘one butterfly’ as said in a song. Every other cricketer – greats like Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, and Harmanpreet Kaur who played alongside Raj, are not introduced to us at all. Their names only pop up in the culminating World Cup montage, which is among the laziest and most unimaginative final sequences of any sports film in recent memory.

The re-enactments of the matches have none of the tension that makes limited-overs cricket so entertaining. Something like a Chakde India!, which was also based on a woman’s world cup, and had questions about the sport for women, was far more gripping in terms of the drama and conflict. The montage comprised of a repetitive reel of footage of the actual matches with the actors CGI’d in. After a point, it became a hypnotic rhythm on loop.

Additionally, there is no sequence that tells us that Raj in fact captained India in 2 world cups – the makers didn’t show the first probably because the loss was too much for the country – but to be true while making a sports biopic, that is the least one would expect. There is only one photo, at the end, which shows the real Mithali Raj – that too, a world cup group photo. What saves the film in parts is the soundtrack by Amit Trivedi, which after a point gets too repetitive as well.

Overall, the film had a lot of scope to experiment, get in stories, and anecdotes (imagine something like an ’83, which is based on the life of Kapil Dev and India winning the world cup), but it is just a bland curation of a complex legacy.