Subhash K. Jha speaks about Meerabai Not Out 
By Subhash K. Jha, December 5, 2008 - 17:14 IST
What do you say about a comedy that brings cricketer Anil Kumble on screen only to induce hiccups?
Every time our cricketer-heroine Meera Achrekar remembers her favourite cricketer Kumble bursts into hefty hiccups. Just goes to show, you can take Guddi out of our films. But you can't take our films out of Guddi
Each time Mandira Bedi whines about being in love with cricket and cricketer Anil Kumble to the tycoon who falls in love with her (Eijaz Khan), she reminds us of Jaya Bachchan in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, so obsessed with movies and Dharmendra (in that order) she can't think straight.
Meera can. If you want to play cricket, you have to think straight. To the writer Soumik Sen's credit, he gives Mandira Bedi a role to sink her teeth into. Experienced actor and cricket connoisseur that she is, Mandira gets into the groove with lip smacking relish, abandoning lip gloss for Lagaan lips and hip-gyrations for rollicking sprints down Mumbai's gullis with the mundas of the mohallah.
Lamentably, she isn't required to play much cricket, just talk about it. This either means that the screenwriter finally doesn't endorse the zany image of Meerabai as a spunky iconoclast speeding around Mumbai's crowded highway on a two-wheeler without gender care. Or just that Mandira didn't get time to practice her cricket on the field.
Be as it might, even the climactic cricket game in the chawl compound staged between Mandira's beau and her brother(Mahesh Manjrekar, supremely confident in his middleclass space) is perfunctory and more a snatch of a match to bring about the marital match than a breathless display of cricketing skills.
The prevalent mood of Meerabai Not Out is one of a plot not fully developed, and yet ripe enough to give out the appetizing aroma of a fruit on the way to ripening.
There is a lived-in flavour of a Marathi household with a harassed brother mumbling curses under his breath at the bus stop, a mother at home who worries constantly about the unmarried (and thoroughly cricket-smitten) daughter in the house, a Bhabhi who thinks stealing an evening of paani-puri at the pavement is equivalent to domestic liberation and a well-to-do heart specialist who is so besotted by his cricketer girlfriend that he's willing to forgive her for everything including stealing away from their engagement function for a cricket match, to making bad jokes("You don't have bandages because you're a heart specialist and the heart can't be bandaged").
It doesn't take too long for us to figure out there's more than a touch of Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham in this instant sporty and sassy version of the inimitable Parminder Nagra's gender-defying love of football in Bend It Like Beckham.
Parminder had Beckham, Mandira has Kumble. The cultural crossover is clever, though not fully realized. Often you feel the narration under-plays the conflict between what a girl does in life and what she should do. Just because it doesn't want to stretch out its limbs.
Also, there's the disturbing premise that finally Meera (or any girl with extraordinary aspirations) needs a man and in this case the man's father (Anupam Kher, trying to add shades to a common clichéd father's role) to see her dreams past the goal post.
As a desi version of Bend It Like Beckham, Meerabai Not Out is not bad at all. As a showcase for Mandira's cricketing ambitions, the narration brings her just about the best role she's likely to get on the side side of Chak De.
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"It would have been foolish on my part to let go of Meerabai" - Eijah Khan
