I can count the number of Indian movies that I’ve seen on one hand: The Bandit Queen in a majority white audience, LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha at home via streaming, Dangal and Stree in theaters to a majority Indian audience. Even though I watch an insane number of movies and am very interested in foreign films, it is a relatively new experience to watch a film not directed to Western audiences in an audience filled with the intended target viewers, which does not include me, but I think that part of more representation in films should be stretching your horizons and checking out films from different countries that are not marketed to you, but that still sound appealing.
I was attracted to Stree, which translates to woman or female, because I love horror films. It is based on an urban legend called Nale Ba about a vengeful spirit described as a witch in the movie who abducts men leaving nothing behind but their clothes. I knew that it was also a comedy, but didn’t expect it to be a less explicit and chaste version of a guy teen sex romp comedy like American Pie or Porky’s, but instead of losing their virginity, they are grown men whose goal is to find the right woman and get married. If I had known that it was not Joss Whedon funny, I probably would have skipped it or waited until it was available for home viewing.
Stree focuses on Vicky, a talented tailor of women’s clothes, during a four-day festival in which men must stay together at night or risk falling prey to Stree. He meets a beautiful, mysterious woman who coincidentally only appears at this time and ignores his two friends’ admonishments not to meet her as the list of victims hits closer to home. Will Vicky be next?
As Eddie Izzard wisely noticed, comedy is tricky once you go to a different country and gets even more complicated when there is a language barrier because timing is everything. It is the difference between intellectually knowing that a joke is funny versus actually laughing immediately upon hearing it. It wasn’t my brand of humor so I was already at a disadvantage, but then a lot got lost in translation. Everyone seemed to be having a great time, but I’m not going to pretend as if I got it and had a great time. For me, the funniest part of the movie was Rudra, a supporting character who acts as if he is a knowledgeable scholar but consistently fails to inform his eager audience.
Music and dancing are universal languages, and there are two great musical numbers. “Kamariya” appears in the middle of Stree during the first night of the festival, which is worth the Google search and is the one time that I spontaneously cracked up immediately afterwards at the characters’ actions long after the song ends. Nora Fatehim, a Moroccan-Canadian performer whom I am not familiar with, but Shakira better watch her back, performs that number. During the credits, stay for “Milegi Milegi,” which features the entire cast and has a more mocking of gender norms than in the prior number.
Stree plays up the twist that men are the vulnerable afraid of women, but considering that fear of a sexually active woman can be found anywhere regardless of religion, region or ethnicity, is it really such a twist? The takeaway lesson is to respect women, stay home and get married, which is fine, but the ending confused me. I expected the first twist for Vicky’s love interest, but the final one puzzled me. Why would you want that? It seems as if the filmmaker was more interested in laying down the groundwork for a sequel, but because I’m unfamiliar with Indian movies and culture, I could just be clueless and cynical.
Despite a strong score and atmosphere that places it closer to J Horror than more mainstream, conventional American horror films, Stree is fairly bloodless even in the denouement. When they are trying to destroy the creature, which is sweet and shows good character, but is absolutely the opposite of what I’m looking for when I sit down to watch a horror movie. The family friendly scares pulls punches, but it is hard to critique empathy and respect so I’ll just blame society for my bloodlust.
Stree is 128 minutes, which is a little long to appreciate the message while struggling not to fall asleep because your seat in the theater is so comfortable, and I wasn’t engrossed. It also didn’t help that there was assigned seating, which I already hate. It led to a lot of disruptive latecomers who thought that despite the showing being sold out, assigned seating was a suggestion. I’m sure that these interruptions contributed to my confusion.
I bought a ticket for the only seat available in the row that I wanted: two seats to my right and a ton to my left. So when a bunch of older people arrived late using the flashlight app on their cell, sat around me, two seated to my right and one to my left, and started passing snacks and talking over my seat, I offered the person to my left, an older gentleman, a chance to switch since I preferred his seat anyway and would have purchased it if it was available. I was completely flummoxed that they chose those seats instead of buying adjacent seats since I waited too late to purchase my reservation. I just thought that maybe because they were older, they didn’t realize it because they weren’t familiar with the technology. No!
Cut to even later in the film when younger people arrived, it was the same situation, but they actually had the older people’s chosen seats, but they wanted me to stay in the older guy’s seat even though I had switched because they wanted to sit together. WHY WOULD YOU BUY SEATS APART FROM PEOPLE THAT YOU WERE GOING WITH EVEN THOUGH THE ADJACENT SEAT WAS AVAILABLE?!? So that means the older group chose to pilfer the seats around me and did not buy them even though there were other empty rows waiting for people who bought the seat, but never came or were late! WHY DID THE OLDER PEOPLE DECIDE TO SURROUND ME WHEN THEY COULD HAVE SAT ALL ALONE IN OTHER ROWS!?!? WHY ARE ALL OF YOU COMING TO A MOVIE LONG AFTER IT STARTED?!? WHY WAS THE SHOWING SOLD OUT BUT MANY OF THE PEOPLE NEVER CAME!?! I prefer the first come, first serve method. I choose my seat and stay there without having to interact with people, and if you come late, I can just silently glare at you instead of thinking of ways to improve our collective theatrical experience. Assigned seating seems to cultivate latecomers. Let me get my middle middle seat by arriving insanely early while the rest of you angle for whatever crappy seats are leftover. Ugh!