There is a dialogue in the movie, uttered by Swara Bhaskar aka Anaarkali, the whiff of fresh air with bursts of colourful erotica, “Chahe wo randi ho, ya usse kam, ya aapki biwi… agli baar marzi pooch ke haath lagana.”

This, precisely, is the gist of this brave attempt by the cast and crew of ‘Anaarkali of Aarah’. This movie is a culmination of niche concept with brilliant performances. Of course, it has its shortcomings, but we will come to that later.

‘Anaarkali of Aarah’ is the story of an erotic singer Anaarkali (Swara Bhaskar), who lives off by singing erotic numbers. Accompanying her is her assistant Rangeela (Pankaj Tripathi). She is comfortable in her own skin and enjoys what she does, till a local VC (Sanjay Mishra) grabs and gropes her. It is then that she realises that while crooning erotic words and gyrating to those tunes to please the eyes of men, she has somehow given them a license to touch her; she has become their unspoken property. There begins her struggle to bust the myth and fight the powerful.

Swara has blown life into the character of Anaarkali and matching her to perfection in performance is Pankaj Tripathi as Rangeela. Sanjay Mishra, the one who has given us so many comic roles to remember, plays the vicious role so amazingly well that you are in awe of his skills. The director has tightly woven around the plot and given the message loud and clear, nothing is right without consent, and consent is given in a direct yes.

An applause should be reserved for Rohit Sharma and others, who wove the lyrics in perfect sync with the folk music and local dialect, to bring out the essence of Aarah and its Anaarkali.

The slight shortcoming that one notices is the character development. While Swara brings out every frame alive, we feel that slight slack to her screen time might have given other characters a chance to breathe. Also, there are times when the local dialect becomes too complex to be understood by common people like us. A little tweak there could also have done the deed better.

We would give ‘Anaarkali of Aarah’ a solid 3 and a ½. What ‘PINK’ taught us in urban language, this movie teaches us in the language of those who are deemed ignorant. This is a cheer to those females of the distant areas who fight a fight every single day, to survive in this patriarchal world.