24 frames per second

Kiran Rao’s sophomore feature Laapataa Ladies begins at a bidaai (a farewell to the bride as she leaves to go to her in-laws’ house). The bride’s face is covered with a veil so all-encompassing that she can barely see anything past her feet. There is a moment of brief panic in her face when her tearful mother puts the veil on her, and she finds suddenly that she has literally been walled off. (I tip my hat here to Jane Fonda who, in a splendid monologue in The Newsroom, informed me that the meaning of the word literally has been expanded to cover the way in which it has been commonly misused.)

Then someone gestures to the husband that it’s time to leave. He nods, gets up and walks off briskly, before she has even begun to stand. As they walk, she trails with her family a bit behind him. There’s a part of our mind that screams out the P-word, but the film wants to do a bit more than that. He keeps looking back once in a while to ensure she’s okay. Once the couple are on top of the bus, you see him making sure she is comfortably seated, her jewellery secure and so on. On the train, he makes sure she gets to sit while he stands nearby.

It is just his luck that there are two couples in more or less identical clothing in the same bay, and this leads to a mix-up that sets up the story’s rather fun premise.

Kiran Rao finds an interesting tone here, through just the visuals — there is enough ingrained behaviour to suggest that the codified gender roles in this milieu, but she does not rob the characters of their humanity either. This accidental bride swap, too, is done with just enough contrivance to make it straddle the line between believable and fantastic. There are so many specific and expressive little touches in just this opening sequence that you realize you’re watching a film made by someone who really understands how to craft a story for a visual medium.

The funny thing is, the actual dialogue is often just two heartbeats shy of the obvious, if that. In the aforementioned sequence, for instance, the veiled bride stumbles at one point, and is told, “Learn to look down while talking, not ahead.” This line is good — it has a point to make, but finds a nice balance between the literal and the metaphorical.

But consider a later conversation between two women in a household, about how there’s so much to do that they hardly find the space to be friends. That this conversation happens between a couple of women whose earlier interactions are a lot snippier makes the warmth here both welcome and, in some ways, even unexpected. But the conversation ends with a line that sounds so forced both on the page and on screen, it belongs in a different movie. This isn’t the only time it happens — you get a bunch of beautiful lines, and then something jarringly simplistic.

This is not necessarily a deal-breaker. Put the right foot forward often enough, and one is inclined to forgive the occasional misstep. This is true even in the broader sense: The story, when summarized, sounds a bit contrived and message-heavy, but the film itself is so light on its feet that it manages to work even when the plot descends into obviousness.

But the little visual grace notes? Oh, that’s where the film comes into full bloom. Apart from the marvellous opening sequence, where little is spoken but so much is said, the film is peppered with eloquent visuals. Ravi Kishen (chewing paan and scenery in equal and generous measure) is picturized mostly seated behind his inspector’s desk, or on a motorcycle, or some such thing. But at a crucial juncture, you see him standing in front of another character, and the shot composition does so much to convey his physical presence that it gives him the necessary gravitas at exactly the right moment. At the end of the film, there is a moment when the camera lingers on a couple walking away, just long enough to capture an almost throwaway action involving a veil, and it tells us so much more than any line of dialogue ever could.

A woman and a veil. The same as when we began this tale. What has changed? For some, everything.