Baipan Bhari Deva Review - Six Women's Fight For Fading Womanhood

Kedar Shinde gets back to the womanhood zone with his latest Marathi film, "Baipan Bhari Deva," starring six actresses: Rohini Hattangadi, Vandana Gupte, Sukanya Kulkarni, Shilpa Navalkar, Suchitra Bandekar, and Deepa Parab. Kedar has earlier explored woman-oriented cinema in the Marathi industry with "Aga Bai Arrecha!" "Bakula Namdev Ghotale" and "Aga Bai Arrecha 2", but his first attempt has been most successful and loved. That magic of Kedar Shinde is missing now, or better said, it needs brushing since he hasn't been able to hit the right chords with almost all of his last films. With Baipan Bhari Deva, he attempts to regain the lost glory of woman-oriented cinema and somehow manages to pull off a decent show. This Manglagaur tale of womanhood is likely to get noticed by female and male audiences who have been involved in such situations, but from the critic's point of view, the movie needed a little more brushing to clear the dust off Kedar Shinde's recent commercial potboilers.Baipan Bhari Deva is about six sisters, Jaya (Rohini Hattangadi), Shashi (Vandana Gupte), Sadhana (Sukanya Kulkarni), Pallavi (Suchitra Bandekar), Ketaki (Shilpa Navalkar), and Charu (Deepa Parab), who haven't been on good terms for a long time now. Shashi has complex issues with her daughter's mother-and-law, which leads her to join the competition at Manglagaur. Naturally, she needs a team to win the competition. It happens that Shashi and her five sisters have been a good team of Manglagaurs since way back in time. The tough and literally impossible mission of gathering all the sisters together begins as they face each other every day while rehearsing for the competition. During the practise sessions, the sisters come close to each other as they express their feelings and problems and even find solutions for them.The basic script of Baipan Bhari Deva is simple but a little outdated. The same storyline would have made a difference in the 2000s or 2010s, but today's audience has gone way ahead of such stories, with "Jhimma" making enough noise for a certain set of audiences. BBD isn't a feel-good movie like Jhimma; rather, it's dramatic, sometimes too dramatic. Those intelligent speeches and clever characters are missing. Not every character can be problematic. This film kicks this basic logic out of the narrative, only to make the film more dramatic and less realistic. A few jokes here and there are pleasant, but the humour isn't quite smart. Every single woman has a problem, and nothing new, but the same old cry-bubbles, while tackling those issues isn't an updated thing for 2023. Baipan Bhari Deva needed better conflicts and a finer screenplay to get the womanhood dose right. Unfortunately, that didn't happen here.It's hard to accept Rohini Hattangadi doing all those amazing things at this age. Believe me, even youngsters don't do it that well. How do you manage to do it, ma'am? My mother would like to know the secret of your energy, if not me. Vandana Gupte is a typical woman, abandoned by lost motherhood, but I didn't feel her character that deeply. Although she acted and danced well, her charm wasn't enough to save the badly written character. Deepa Parab is back on the big screen after a while, and she makes her presence visible. The breakdown scene at the birthday party and that scream in the car were just fabulous. Sukanya Kulkarni is up to it, Suchitra Bandekar is a glamour-minus-respectable woman, and Shilpa Navalkar too has a weak character, but they all have done a fine job from their sides. The male cast adds decent support there.Baipan Bhari Deva has a tedious musical structure that sounds good to the ears but makes the eyes have a little meltdown. The presentation of the Manglagaur song in the climax is the best of them all, while that viral railway platform dance was too predictable. The cinematography doesn't offer anything great, nor does the editing. However, the production design is better. Kedar Shinde's vision to explore womanhood issues seems outdated, and the punches too need a modern touch now. There was nothing much he could do with the script, but yes, he could have managed to pull off comedy better. After all, that's his forte. If you can't succeed at your strengths, then you definitely need to look for the betterment of other things. Overall, Baipan Bhari Deva might work for some men and women who are fans of daily soaps and would want to change themselves, but as a feature film, it isn't anything more than an average, one-time watch.