‘Girly Movies’ and Prevalence of Female Characters - A Study on ‘Page-3’-The Only Best Film National Award Winning Hindi Film of the Decade 2001-2010

The powerful role of cinema in the public sphere has been already established through years of research and analysis. They are proved to influence the way the audience begins to think about the reality around them. In a world that speaks of gender inequality in the highest levels, it offers an enthusiastic study when one attempts to check how the real-life stories when translated into screens present the women folk. The present study is a qualitative research on ‘Page-3’ by Madhur Bhandarkar, which won the best film National award in India in the year 2004, becoming the only Hindi film in the first decade of 2000 to win this prestigious Golden Lotus. The researcher in his analysis finds out that though it shows shades of the first ‘girly’ film made in Indian context, it presents the female protagonist in the traditional moulds and attitudes. But even as the film gives the lion space of its screen time to its female leads limiting the important male characters just to very few minutes, the power to affect the lives of females still resided with the male folk.

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