Critics reviews

It is easy to feel the passion with which Yadav tells the story, and to feel intimately connected with her characters, even in the midst of heavy-handed and almost bloated commentary, which sometimes feels a bit too blatantly thrown in. Aside from this however, much of the film’s emotional impact manages to feel entirely earned.

There are moments of genuine intimacy between the women. Their bond and love is authentic. But overall, Parched feels a bit forced, like it was written to make a set of larger points.

Parched is a confronting film... Yet it is a hopeful work; it refuses to wallow in misery, instead focusing on the small, important moments of grace, beauty and empathy that enable these characters to get by. It’s also a surprisingly funny movie; writer and director, Leena Yadav, has a gift for bawdy dialogue and, given the film’s focus on sex and gender roles in modern India, she gets to exercise it a lot.

The four women at the film's heart have a simmering chemistry and though the film's conclusion is somewhat hastily worked compared to the intricate development that has gone before, the hopeful resolution feels in keeping with the film's fable elements, reminding us that happy endings, while not always probable, are still possible.

That Yadav chose to make "Parched" in response to these stories shows how honestly she wanted to understand their actions, unfathomable to many Western minds. And it seems that in drawing Rani, Lajjo, and Bijli as smart, articulate, skillful, successful, and sexy women, she succeeds.

Despite the appalling circumstances and events it depicts, the movie’s plain and unstinting affection for its lead characters gives “Parched” a frequently buoyant tone. Ms Yadav’s frames are always filled with bright color, and the editing maintains an almost infectious rhythm as the characters move toward whatever self-determination they can find.

Leena Yadav’s “Parched” is a bright jewel of a film, surprisingly funny, fresh and upbeat in the way it takes on the complicated and often dark topic of sexual politics in rural India.

Parched‘s weak characterization also distracts from Yadav and her co-creators’ more sensuous contributions, particularly dialogue writer Supratik Sen’s breezy banter, Russell Carpenter’s (Titanic) sunny cinematography, and costume designer Ashima Belapurkar’s vibrant wardrobe.

While this perspective is critical of the individual circumstances that oppress each of these women, any broader indictment of prevailing cultural trends is much more diffuse, more likely to attribute blame to dysfunctional traditions rather than any specific political, social or religious institutions. It’s a delicate balancing act that sometimes appears to lack conviction, given the specificity of the settings that Yadav has selected to contextualize the narrative.

Weaving her stories into an incisive tapestry of oppression, Yadav conveys the twisted link between the men’s cruelty and the women’s instinctual impulse to blame themselves, and each other, for their own mistreatment. In that way, “Parched” taps into the way intolerance gains enduring, systemic traction and the difficulty of breaking free of its grasp, no matter the various methods of escape that manifest themselves.