Calendar Girls: A mockery in the name of Realistic Cinema
Madhur Bhandarkar is synonymous with hard hitting realistic cinema in a mainstream format. Starting from Chandni Chowk, Satta, Page 3, Traffic Signal, Fashion, Corporate, Jail all had a premise which basically showed the real picture of our society. But his last offering “Heroine” was not that impactful and it showed how Madhur was losing the plot….
His latest “Calendar Girls” as the name suggests shows the life of 5 aspiring models Sharon Pinto (Kyra Dutt) from Goa, Mayuri Chauhan 
(Ruhi Singh) from Rohtak, Nandita Menon (Akansha Puri) from Hyderabad, Paroma Ghosh (Satarupa Pyne) from Kolkata and Nazneen (Avani Modi) from Lahore. They get the opportunity to model for annul fashion calendar post which their life changes forever. The film captures the trial & tribulation of each girl and what happens to their life….
“Calendar Girls” written by Madhur Bhandarkar and Anil Pandey looks like a cocktail of Madhur’s previous movies Page 3, Fashion & Heroine. Nothing wrong in that but here the writing is too amateurish and inconsistent. The characters do not have any depth and look lifeless without any emotional content, especially the character of the girls who were supposed to be the back bone of the script, look sketchy. The screenplay looks as if the writers Madhur and Anil have taken snippets of news from dailies and tried to form a story which does not work. To give the movie a realistic twist some sequences are added which falls flat as it lacks in emotional quotient. I felt the movie tried to show too many things but fails miserably and is a complete wash out. Even the climax does not sum up the movie.
Even the dialogues written by Rohit Banawlikar do not create any impact barring a few. Rather the English dialogues are unintentionally funny, and too much usage of words like “Babes”, “Sweet Heart”, irritates you after some time.
After the weak writing the casting goes completely wrong, the 5 girls Kyra Dutt, Ruhi Singh, Akansha Puri, Satarupa Pyne and Avani Modi on which the movie is based fail to impress, rather amongst the lot only Kyra Dutt is satisfactory, rest of the four girls just ham, especially Ruhi Singh whose accent irritates you and Avani Modi whose morose expression is intact all throughout the movie whereas she had the meatiest role as far as histrionics is concerned as compared to the other girls. Satarupa Pyne fails miserably in emotional scenes. Even the support cast of Rohit Roy, Suchitra Pillai, Kiran Kumar, and even Mita Vashishtha fail to impress.
Technically the movie lacks finesse and fails to capture the glamour which should have been the main ingredient of this movie.
Madhur Bhandarkar now needs a reality check; he needs to re-visit how he wants to make his movies as now his genre looks dated. He cannot repeat the same premise of his previous movies and try to present it in a new format.
“Calendar Girls” is a complete mockery in the name of realistic Cinema, I will go with One & a Half Star…..
Movie Rating: 
(1.5 / 5)