The trailer of Shakuntala Devi showed a glimpse of her troubled relationship with her daughter Anupama, played by Sanya Malhotra. Anupama allowed Menon to showcase her mother’s story through her flaws, and the filmmaker is grateful to her since she “can’t put a person on a pedestal”. Writer and director of Shakuntala, Anu Menon says it is okay to be imperfect, to make mistakes. “I think so. I feel we need to own it and not be apologetic about anything. When we tell women-centric stories, we often tend to make them underdogs. We show, ‘see a woman is doing all of this’, as if most women can’t do it, but this woman has been able to do it. I think we deserve to be as successful and as flawed as anybody else. It’s not just for women. Even for men.
The pressure to be perfect is too much these days. It’s okay to make mistakes and apologise. The story of Shakuntala Devi is not told like a female empowerment film,” Menon concluded. Often Bollywood biopics are accused of being hagiographies, but Anu Menon feels, “Whitewashing someone’s image is not good cinema. When you watch a film, you watch a person who has both good and bad. That is what makes for a good drama. So, if it is just a puff piece, that doesn’t make for good cinema.” She added, “One of the things I loved about Shakuntala Devi’s story was, she was not scared to fail. The good and the not so good existed in Shakuntala so intrinsically that you can’t love her by just loving her genius. You have to love Shakuntala for all kinds of things she did, either right or wrong. So, I think that sort of attitude is what we should celebrate. That’s what excites me as a filmmaker and that’s what excited Vidya (Balan). She has said no to many biopics in the past because it just felt not true.”
