Laapataa Ladies, a story about women by a woman, triumphed over Animal, the story of an 'alpha male', as it was announced as India's official entry to the Oscars 2025. Sandeep Reddy Vanga, we hope you're okay. Or should we expect another wave of snarky replies on X over the articles comparing your 'magnum opus' to the humble Laapataa Ladies?
Let's start with a brief background of both films. Ladies first; oh wait -- winners first: Let's talk about Laapataa Ladies. Directed by Kiran Rao, it tells the tale of two brides from the interiors of Madhya Pradesh, who get exchanged right after their wedding, thanks to the veils, aka, ghoonghats, covering their faces, drawn upto their chests. While one bride, Jaya (Pratibha Ranta), tries to peek through and lift the veil of patriarchy in her own quirky ways, another bride, Phool (Nitanshi Goel), learns to get out of the veil and face the sun, albeit reluctantly at first.
At the same time, there are three men in the story -- Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava), who is, well, a 'green flag', Pradeep (Bhaskar Jha), who is the darkest shade of a red flag, and the one cop who finds himself in the centre of this chaos, Shyam Manohar (Ravi Kishan), who is corrupt but with a conscience. As the film ends, the two brides finally let go of their veils completely, both literally and metaphorically, thus freeing themselves from the weaves of patriarchy. Any more narration and I'll be giving away spoilers.
Now, time for Animal. This is a story about, as I said earlier, an alpha male, who clearly has 'daddy issues' (as per the trendy GenZ lingo). Twenty minutes into the film, the protagonist Ranvijay, played by Ranbir Kapoor, is telling the woman he loves (Geetanjali, played by Rashmika Mandanna) that she has a "big pelvis" and is capable of bearing "healthy children". And that's enough for Geetanjali to break off her engagement with a well-settled man and elope with Ranvijay. Another 10 minutes, and a young Ranvijay is firing an actual gun in a classroom because a senior catcalled his sister. As we manage to finish the first hour, he has already killed his brother-in-law and said 'papa' some 50-odd times.
The second hour has Ranvijay discussing his 'underwear issues' with his wife, slashing through 200 men wearing a lungi, pulling at his wife's bra strap and hurting her, and later applying medicine to her wounds, all because she was upset with him for not caring about his own life, and saying 'papa' another 50 times. By the end of the third and final hour, Ranvijay has cheated on his wife with a woman named Zoya (Triptii Dimri) -- whom he later asks to lick his shoe, walked out in the garden naked to remind people he is still the 'alpha male', ordered his wife not to get married again if he dies in the battle with Abrar Haque (Bobby Deol), and ultimately killed Abrar, and of course, has yapped 'papa' 50 times again. In the climax, Ranvijay conveniently conveys that he is the 'animal' that he is because his beloved 'papa' was an absent figure in his life, sending poor Anil Kapoor on a guilt trip.
Now, let's discuss some commercials. Animal earned over Rs 900 crore globally, while Laapataa Ladies managed to rake in a little over Rs 20 crore at the global box office. Both the films then hit OTT, and the tables turned. Laapataa Ladies easily zoomed past the 'blockbuster' to garner more views than Animal online. Sadly, this also exposed the divided interests of the theatre-going and OTT audience of the country.
The problematic part in this entire fiasco was not which film earned more or which story was better; I mean, it was; but actual trouble began when director Sandeep Reddy Vanga started defending Animal and the misogynist characteristics of the protagonist. He got into a war of words with anyone and everyone who called out the toxic nature of his film -- from veteran screenwriter Javed Akhtar to Kiran Rao herself. It got to the point that he became an ignorant animal on social media himself, who was ready to attack anyone who would dare to point out a flaw in his film which had too many of them.
Not just Vanga, but even Ranbir and other actors, and a section of the internet, stood firm by the film and said that a film was not meant to give out a social message all the time. But in today's time, when social media influence is at its peak, do we really need such cinema that says it's 'alpha' to abuse your wife, kill people recklessly, and make sexist comments about each and every woman around you?
It has almost been 10 months since the release of Animal, and while the debate around it still gets reignited every now and then, the nation has passed the final verdict as Laapataa Ladies was selected as India's official Oscars entry and not Animal. The announcement reinstated the faith in millions of movie-lovers that while box office numbers might be important for a film, the last laugh is always had by the story and the intent when it comes to cinema. Feminism and progressive ideologies are slowly branching out through the cracks of the hardened walls of patriarchy in Indian society, and Laapataa Ladies' victory is one massy example of the same
