Avni runs her own beauty salon and aspires to have at least four branches across Mumbai. She is a woman of ambition with a huge appetite (literally). She is spunkier than Singham’s fiancé in the first movie and a little psychotic as well, making the two quite well-matched. There’s a point in the movie at which her beating up a small-time reporter makes it to YouTube, and everyone calls her Lady Singham. There are other named women characters in the movie, like Neeta Parmar, the TV star who stands for elections (a character inspired by Smriti Irani) and the fiery journalist (inspired by Barkha Dutt), but their screen time can perhaps be counted in seconds, and they have about four lines each. Obviously, none of the lines are said to other women and if they are, they are usually about some man – mostly Singham.
The film was less of a comic book superhero movie than the first one; this one was more like cop porn. Lots of men in uniforms doing the Reservoir Dogs walk to the film’s soundtrack. All the time. What was interesting, though, was that almost every time Singham changed his method of operation, or acted on something, it was because a woman said something to him. Be it Avni, the wife of a dead and framed constable, a slumdweller’s mother or even the journalist who initially hates him but starts to respect him after he uses a law that is supposed to help women (no male cop can arrest a woman) to ensure that a group of women slaps and threatens a villainous politician on stage in front of his followers. But it goes without saying (and still I have to say it): Singham Returns fails the Bechdel Test.
On a completely irrelevant note, Daya from the TV show CID plays a character called Daya (who is mostly a replica of his character on CID) – he received more applause than anything else in the film. I am talking house-full-show raise-the-roof applause here!
I hate to invoke Hollywood, which doesn’t have a great Bechdel Test track record itself, but last night I watched a female buddy cop comedy – Paul Feig’s The Heat starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. Now that’s how you make a cop movie with women.