Fear of flying

Spoilers and puns aheadIt is fitting that the two main songs of Crew are from the 1990s Choli ke peeche kya hai and Ghagra Ila Arunrsquos voice driving sex through a sludgy remix road scattering gravel with each swerve of her ldquoghumiyordquo It was a decade in which girls really did have fun And Crewrsquos story is birthed in Indian liberalizationrsquos first decade whose quintessential figure was the air hostess or flight attendant working in all those new private airlines that promised to give the new economy and the new woman wingsCut to 2024 The filmrsquos flight attendant protagonists have not received their salaries for six months Missed EMIs haunt their nightmares Itrsquos the economy stupid Many men in the film are unemployed or unemployable Women keep things going with what jobs they can get side hustles clawing their way to a PF Kriti Sanon is trained as a pilot but works as a flight attendant Liberalisationrsquos the boyfriend who texted and ghosted the Frankfinn girlThe characters try a preliberalisation move smuggling They think they have things beat Then they discover that the Subroto SarkarVijay Mallaya mashup Chairman of their airline having made his millions off their labour is now smuggling said millions as gold bricks through them to declare bankruptcy flee the country and leave thousands of employees stranded Thus begins their sometimes funny sometimes sloppy vigilante journeyTabu reclining in kaftans with a casual smoke her voice dark and sweet like Vietnamese coffee Kareena amoral and desi and decadent like white butter gliding ever so slowly on a hot ajwain paratha Kriti like many Chandigarh girls Irsquove known driven and tense The livedin beauty and the umami worldliness of the older women in fact a world of many women Diljit Dosanjh yumminess and Kapil Sharmarsquos Bearhug Boyfriend vibe makes Crew often pleasurableBut as with the economy we are promised a flight of fancy and left halfway to paradise Crew is often funny but it has only three truly terrific lines Kareena to a loverrsquos angry wife I didnrsquot cheat on you na Tabu to Kareena Oh Cleopatra foundation hai time machine nahin And Tabu asked to hurry itrsquos a 100dollar coffee Irsquoll finish every pocket of foam Crew also has one too many cringeclassist lines ldquoIrsquove worked like a bairdquo ldquoIrsquoll have to put my kid in a government schoolrdquo ldquoShould I work as a hookerrdquo mdashas if those women are not working women yaar Come onCrew is an inadvertent allegory of the last three decades A middleclass complicit in a capitalist dream Temporary rewards followed by unpaid EMIs A new party voted into powermdashfor developmentmdashbut crony capitalists got rich and ditched the nation The poor get screwed The middleclasses teeterCrew works by reflecting these experiential truths and making womenrsquos inner lives the centre Crew is unable to break free of the world it critiques offering neither political punch nor creative flightmdashgee I wonder if the two are connected Both things are constrained like legroom on Indigo Airlines Using middleclass discontent as meaningful heft shows a lack of political understanding A careless script without any screwball absurdity feels like they know we the audience are hungry for fun films with women and would settle Why should boys have all the capitalism basBut yeh dil maange more Because wersquore worth it Or arenrsquot weParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom