“How will you manage in the US without knowing English, ” a visa officer asks Shashi. To make matters worse, the writing turns rather cheesy at times. Moreover, the film fails to create the Marathi ambiance that would have added a significant layer to the narrative.īarring snatches of a wedding song towards the end of the film, the cultural moorings of English Vinglish remain indeterminate. That is the problem with English Vinglish – it rests on an anachronistic hypothesis that is both overly facile and contrived. A lady who makes the best laddoos in town and runs a thriving catering business from home would surely need no endorsement of her self-worth in this day and age.Ĭouldn’t she have just got up and gone to a friendly neighbourhood teaching shop to pick up functional English? And even if she didn’t, why should it have really mattered to her? The lady’s school-going daughter is a bright kid by all accounts but she loses no opportunity to ridicule her mother.Ĭome off it girl, this is 2012. The husband isn’t an insensitive ogre but that doesn’t stop him from declaring that Shashi is “born to make laddoos”. It is a shallow tale of a self-effacing woman who begins to discover herself only when she flies to New York for a niece’s wedding and enrolls in an English language crash course to rid of what her hubby and children perceive as her one great drawback.Īlthough it is impressively crafted, crisply edited and generally well-acted, English Vinglish hobbles along on the crutches of all manner of stereotypes. But despite the temptation, it is eventually too docile an affair to send the heart pounding and the pulse racing.Įnglish Vinglish, for all its surface gloss and clean family entertainer aspirations, doesn’t possess that little something needed to turn a one-dimensional account of the makeover of an unassuming homemaker into a convincing, universal drama about a woman’s empowerment. Tame superficiality is indeed the biggest bane of English Vinglish, which, for the most part, is otherwise reasonably watchable, especially owing to a charming performance by Sridevi, back on the big screen after a 15-year hiatus.Ī star is reborn and one wants to fall in love with her all over again. This film hinges on an idea that only reinforces the phony notion that a woman, no matter how gifted, must speak fluent English in order to truly assert herself. That, crucially, is also what debutante director Gauri Shinde’s well-meaning screenplay unwittingly heaps on the rather simplistically etched central character. That is precisely what Ms Shashi Godbole(Sridevi), Pune-based mother of two, is constantly subjected to by her corporate executive-husband, Satish(Adil Hussain), and her school-going daughter. She runs to her niece and asks: does it mean ‘mental’ judge? No, the girl tells her, it means jumping to damning conclusions about a person on the basis of flimsy evidence. The protagonist of English Vinglish stumbles upon a word she has never heard before – judgmental.