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Shakuntala Devi Movie Review – Vidya Balan is back again in another Biopic of a Human-Computer

Cast and crew

Starring:- Vidya Balan, Jisshu Sengupta, Sanya Malhotra, Amit Sadh

Director:- Anu Menon

Producer:- Sony Pictures Networks India

Distributor:- Prime Video

Released:- 31 july, 2020

Shakuntala Devi is a biopic cum comedy-drama film. It is written and directed by Anu Menon and produced by Sony Pictures networks India under Vikram Malhotra’s banner Abundantia Entertainment. The film stars Vidya Balan as Shakuntala Devi, also known as human-computer or mental calculator, along with Jisshu Sengupta, Sanya Malhotra, and Amit Sadh. The movie was released worldwide on 31, July 2020, on Prime Video.

movie-characters

Jisshu Sengupta acts as Paritosh Banerji (Shakuntala’s husband) in the film. The movie also features Sanya Malhotra as Anupama Banerji (Shakuntala’s daughter) and Amit Sadh as Ajay Abhaya Kumar (Anupama’s husband). Shakuntala Devi is a story of an ordinary girl who shows extraordinary traits as she grows up turning into a world-renowned mathematician. She was also compared to Aryabhatta and Ramanujan of India. The film also shows her as a woman and a mother who faces routine struggles in a family. It also portrays her professional achievements as a genius.

south-indian-girl-vidya-balan

A bold and confident South Indian woman, played by Vidya Balan in the film, shows how independent Shakuntala Devi was in real life too. She loved to live by her own rules. As a child, she was deprived of a normal life by her father. Even in England when she was making her own name known to the world by her astonishing problem-solving skills, she used to carry herself proudly, in traditional Indian Sari and pigtails.

During her life in England, she comes close to a man who assures her that the world is waiting for her. But sometime after that, they both face a break-up. She soon realized that she is happy being herself in her own world, playing with numbers as if they could speak to her.

human-computer

In the film, we also see her coming up with complicated answers with ease. And the audience feels as cheerful as her when she arrives at those solutions. She once defeated the fastest computer of those times in answering a question. That is how she got her name “Human-Computer”. After some time, she finds a soul-mate in Paritosh Banerji while she was performing in Bombay, India in 1968.

When she becomes a mother, the focus of the movie shifts to her struggles as a mother and her family life. Just like everybody else’s, her family life was not a perfect one. She is depicted as an imperfect mother in the movie in contrast to her perfect and successful professional life. In the film, she is mostly shown resolving her personal life issues.

Shakuntala Devi, the mathematics wizard, was in a sometimes-sweet-sometimes-bitter relationship with her husband and her daughter. The very first word that comes out of an infant’s mouth is generally Maa. But in this film, it was Paa because she couldn’t spend much time with her daughter. Her husband was the one who used to take care of their daughter, Anupama, in her mother’s absence most of the time. Shakuntala Devi was busy building her name and fame around the world. For her, “age was just a number, and numbers loved her”.

shakuntala-devi-with-daughter

Shakuntala Devi, the subject of the film has always been associated with mystery. She was not formally educated and was far from exceptional in cognitive tests. Yet she could perform calculations with large numbers in a few seconds. Being a daughter of a circus performer, traveling from one place to another was her routine work. She traveled with her parents since she was three years old and is said to have developed her calculating abilities while performing card tricks. Once she began to extract cube roots in her head, she became a performer showing off her skills. She was already traveling around the world, performing before audiences in colleges and universities, by the time she was a teenager.

As per records, she was somewhat familiar with a certain type of mathematical skills that one learns only after going through formal education. In some of the writings of her time, she discussed logarithms and trigonometry that usually can be learned only through extensive reading and practice. Not much literature is available on this aspect of her life.

Even the movie does not show any glimpses of it. The film only talks about her celebrated life and extraordinary calculation abilities. It fails to show the mental process required to acquire such abilities. Besides, the film focuses more on Shakuntala Devi’s personal life than her professional life. Apart from writing books on mathematical calculations, astrology and, homosexuality, she also contested elections against Indira Gandhi in Medhak during the 1980 Lok Sabha elections.

Vidya Balan has truly proved her mettle in the film by playing the character of Shakuntala Devi. She has breathed life in her character and given an outstanding performance. Her attitude towards life is just like her character in the film. Sanya Malhotra and Amit Sadh fit in as a cute young couple as well. Anu Menon, as a director, has handled the ups and downs in the movie very smoothly.

vidya-balan-shakuntala-devi-story
credit: thehauterfly
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