24 frames per second

There is an extended sequence at around the midpoint of Wonder Women where various expecting couples who make up the prenatal class that the film is set in, engage in an exercise involving a baby doll that they have to pretend is their baby. The subsequent conversations, largely centered around the women’s significant others, give us a glimpse into how the fathers feel about what’s coming.

One of the couples, Jaya and Umesh (Amruta Subhash and Sandesh Kulkarni) is much older than the others; they worry that she might be too old to do this without serious health consequences. The husband talks about how her well-being matters more than anything else. Each word feels like it’s been wrenched out of a quagmire of guilt before it could escape through his larynx. The moment is gut-wrenching in its emotional honesty. The wife’s response is wordless, both here and in an earlier moment with the doll. But the reason why every picture in the world doesn’t speak a thousand words is that every frame of hers in the film uses up more than its allocated quota of words.

In contrast, another father Jojo (Harris Saleem) talks about how his wife Nora (Nithya Menen) seems to have been subsumed by her impending motherhood, and she responds, pretty much, that she wants to be everything that her mother hasn’t been for her. If the term “disappointingly generic” hadn’t already been invented, this exchange would’ve given us a reason to do so. Nithya Menen is a fine actress, but here, all she manages is to be as good as the material, and that’s a problem.

Now consider a third couple, Veni and Bala (Padmapriya and Srikanth Vijayan), who hail from a conservative Thamizh family. She studied to be a lawyer but has settled into the role of a housewife, and is slowly finding a way back to herself. He, from what we have seen so far, acts pretty much like you expect. But in this scene, he finally expresses how much his cluelessness about parenthood bothers him — the last time I touched a doll, I was scolded, he says, which conveys so much (I was reminded, for a moment, of the last chapter of Volga’s Liberation of Sita). Veni responds that this is something they can do together. For a moment there, she sounds as much like his parent as his spouse, and that specific note she finds imbues an ordinary exchange with an extraordinary amount of subtext. Hers is perhaps the most generically written, yet specifically performed character in the entire film. 

While there are other couples involved in this scene, I bring these three up to indicate how this extended sequence is emblematic of the film itself: uneven writing coupled with performances that don’t always make up for it. I came away from the movie feeling underwhelmed.

I wondered at first if the somewhat stagey nature of the entire setup is what I had a problem with. Here’s the thing: it’s not a deal-breaker if the details transcend the structure. Anjali Menon is a good writer-director, but it almost feels like the best scenes are the ones where she kept things absolutely minimalist. 

Take Mini (the Parvathy character), for instance. She’s a single mom dealing with a divorce and a pregnancy at the same time. Everything about her screams someone who is at war with the world. There’s a moment when you see her just standing on the side of a busy road at night, waiting to cross. The way she holds her hand around her belly, you feel as though that baby is her sword and her shield and her castle all at once. Even the tiny moment with the baby doll, when Nandita (Nadiya), the woman who gently pries the doll away from her, is transcendent. But where was all this poetry in either the writing or the acting when it came to completing this character’s arc?

We got all the women. All the wonder? Not so much, I’m afraid.