ENDEARINg COMINgOF-AgE sAgA

G Ippi

STarring: Riya Vij, Divya Dutta, Taaha Shah

Direc Tor: Sonam Nair HHH

At the end of this endearing film you have to admit it’s not just the pre-pubescent protagonist who has come of age. So has mainstream Indian cinema. It can now talk about issues such as homosexuality and menstruation without blushing.

Meet Gippi then. She is free-spirited, unaffected, overweight and underconfident, though not willing to show it (her lack of confidence, that is). Gippi’s story could well have become a pedestrian exercise in cliched sequences woven around the acne-ridden years of awkwardness and self-discovery. Instead, debutant director Sonam Nair gives us vibrant vignettes from a defiant teenager’s life in a posh school in the hills (beautifully shot by cinematographer Anshuman Mahaley) with her single mother (Divya Dutt) and her kid-brother who seems to like all the girlie things more than Gippi herself.

Nair’s fearless narration takes us through Gippi’s life of unfettered selfdiscovery. The film is littered with reams of well-written scenes where we see Gippi going through situations that help her grow up.

There’s her mother’s painful breakup with her father, where Gippi must step in to defend her mother’s falling selfesteem. Then there is Gippi’s own tryst with heartbreak, when during her first serious crush with the campus’ resident James Dean (Taha Shah, well cast in his vain though benign character) she discovers that being fat and unattractive is not such an appalling option after all.

The process of Gippi’s self-exploration is lamentably not carried forward with the confidence and smoothness that one experiences in the first-half of the film when her life is shown to be a series of unplanned near-catastrophes that somehow stop short of reaching a point of no return.

In the second half, the entire chunk devoted to the school elections is