‘Waack Girls’ Review: Sooni Taraporevala’s Show About a Kolkata Dance Group Lacks Rhythm

Creator & Director: Sooni Taraporevala
Writers: Sooni Taraporevala, Iyanah Bativala, Ronny Sen
Dialogues: Sourav Ghosh, Prashasti Singh 
Cast: Mekhola Bose, Rytasha Rathore, Barun Chanda, Anasua Chowdhury, Chrisann Pereira, Priyam Saha, Ruby Sah, Achintya Bose
Language : Hindi, Bengali, English
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video

Rhythm is a thing in the body, a thing in a sentence, a thing in a story; an edgelessness and a cohesion that invites you to flow with it, alongside it. Filmmakers make rhythm, some even break rhythm, but what does one do when a filmmaker neither makes nor breaks it? Waack Girls — written and created by Sooni Taraporevala — about the dance form of waacking or punking, keeps trying to create rhythm… and keeps failing. The nine-episode odyssey of a crew of waackers in Kolkata, who make it against all odds, is lodged in the failure of this rhythm, a not-quiteness.

The very opening shot portends rhythmic doom. From a wideness, the camera emerges, slowly getting closer to a flaking bari (house) in Kolkata. As it approaches the window, there is a cut. And now the camera is inside the bari, snaking through it. As it approaches a dark room, again, a cut pushes us into a dream-struck dance sequence. The cuts are so visible, so heavy, they render the scene fractured.

Taraporevala, better known for her contribution to Mira Nair’s oeuvre as writer —  the Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay! (1988), Mississippi Masala (1991), and The Namesake (2006) — emerged as a director with Little Zizou (2008) and later, Yeh Ballet! (2020), which suffered from a similar not-quiteness. Its climactic ballet sequence was tepid, evoking neither the sigh of grace nor the torsion of labour. It felt empty — the wide-shots a disservice to the close-up that was left out; the cuts a flip-off to the possibility of a longer take, of more time spent with bodies that moved in ways we are not used to seeing. In Waack Girls, too, the close-ups are so messy, with the body parts flung out of the frame, that the bodies often look like amputated statues.

Ishani (Mekhola Bose) got into waacking to paper over personal grief. Waacking, she — as well as the audience — is told, comes from the queer community in Seventies LA: “expression from oppression”. It is the kind of trite writing and flat characterization that prefers to signal easy virtue over inhabiting complexity. It is impossible in this sealed world that Ishani likes dancing because she just does. Dance is “sacred” and “personal” instead. There is a way cinema elevates life by reducing it to cliches. This is that. Ishani lives in that decrepit bari from the opening shot, a house which has seen better years, with her demented grandfather, a yesteryear thespian (Barun Chanda) who holds onto Shakespeare with a grip so strong as though holding onto life and language itself. For theater artists, maybe they are the same, the show nudges us to consider.

Lopa Mehta (Rytasha Rathore), the lesbian daughter of a rich contractor, sees Ishani perform at a talent show where she is shirked off stage and believes Ishani can make it big. She encourages her to select a team of girls to train and later, perform together, that includes Tess (Chrisann Pereira), Michke (Priyam Saha), Anumita (Ruby Sah), and LP (Anasua Chowdhury). Ishani’s neighbour Manik (Achintya Bose) is her rock throughout — the presence of tender and enabling masculinity.

We find out Lopa, “a proud member of the queer community and a hater of oppression,” is a lesbian in the same breath that we find out her parents disapprove — they know it, they know they cannot do anything about it, they are disgusted. The parental disgust and the assertion of queerness comes at one moment. Lopa’s indifference to her parents is staged as exceptional, and the exceptionality, her confidence in front of them feels like a facade, which it may be, but the show is uninterested in that complexity. Rathore’s easy presence makes the character’s exceptionality fall softly on the surface of the show.

Co-written with Iyanah Bativala, and Ronny Sen, scenes feels stitched with fragility, the dialogues come clashing — the easy conversational lilt of abrasive youth and the starchy ones that make it apparent that words were written, rehearsed, and fed into bodies. Rhythm! This is not helped by Bose’s performance which refuses to move beyond the tone that comes naturally to her — morosity. It is in the dance that her performance is lodged more emphatically.

Following Usha Iyer’s theorizing, which wants to shift focus from ‘realist, speech-driven emoting’ to take more seriously ‘performance that is not located only in the face — the most celebrated expressive field for evaluating ‘good acting’— but across the body in dancing legs, gesturing fingers, gyrating torsos, emoting necks and heads’, Bose’s performance comes out stronger. Though even here, the cinematographer Igor Kropotov, is unable to capture the frenetic and angular quality of waacking. The limbs slip out of the frame, and the quick edit keeps trying to replicate the pace of the dance instead of allowing it to be captured. The final music video that the Waack Girls make is so tepid, leaning heavily on the quick edit and the slick animation to emphasize the rapidity of movement, that it almost burns the dance form to platform the idea of it instead.

Yet, you cannot turn away from the gentleness of the show. When Lopa, Ishani, and Manik hold auditions to pick dancers for the dance group, primed by Farah Khan, you think there will be some awful auditions to make fun of, the awfulness of which the characters (and we) will revel in. But the show does no such thing. These are all dancers worth considering. Similarly, Ishani is great at mathematics, enough to not pay attention in class, and so, when a teacher challenges her to solve a proof on the board, she takes it on, and triumphs. There is no sense of being jilted on the teacher’s face — there is, in fact, pride. When the Waack Girls compete with a European crew, it is done with a spirit of gentle competition. This gentleness would work if the show caught onto the language of drama, but there is neither full-bodied presence nor witty writing. The stakes it lays out are so weak, their resolutions so easy, the show melts before it forms. Add to it the sketchy outlines of Ishani’s evil uncles and Lopa’s evil dad — these caricatures hang awkwardly from a show in which language is quieter and less troubled by morality.

The show wants to float lightly, but to be so light that you don’t float, but disappear. Waack Girls, instead, blurs past.