Ladies Room Review: Web The F…K , Two Girls , One Loo & Endless Madness With 2 ‘Girl Bros’

The new web series from Yashraj Films is called Ladies Room. So we know what to expect.

All the stories will be set in the loo. They will feature two female protagonists, played with insouciant insistence by Saba Azad andShreya Dhanwanthary who are cast as ‘Girl bros’.

Ummm, okay then.

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It took me a while to figure out what that means. The two ladies talk and behave like guys, swear and abuse like  guys and talk about sex and related topics with the same devil-may-care toss of the shoulder and shrug of the boobs(yes, let’s talk the way these two girls do) as guys in a smoky bar.

Except that the setting is the toilet each time. Why the toilet? Explains producer Ashish Patel, “The women’s washroom is a sacred space, where shit happens – literally & otherwise. A place where girls groom, gossip, laugh, cry, bitch and more. Women will find it completely relatable and guys will hopefully get the answer to the question that’s been troubling mankind forever – why do women go to the loo in groups!”

It is interesting that the two  girls are made to adhere to the masculine rules of friendship and bonding to appear ‘cool’.They use terms like ‘chodri’ and ‘bhosri’ , they smoke and they put their hand in the commode without grimacing.And of course they discussed PMSing.What would films about urban gender equality be without girls  discussing the time of the month?

Period.

Frankly the premise of two emotionally and sexually  hyper-active girls connecting over the potty is way too politically incorrect to be be spontaneous.  It all appears designed to make us go ‘ouch’ and ‘oops’ and ‘No,they didn’t really just do that!’ and ‘Wow, did did they really use that word I heard my driver using when the car banged into a two-wheeler’!!!

The sense of spontaneous sisterhood is generated through  a lot of dialogues and situations calculated for shock value.

This is what I find revolting in films that purport to show the new-age female.Why must the girls be denuded of all feminine grace to appear hip and trendy? To their credit the two actresses Saba Azad and ShreyaDhanwanthary negotiate the swag with borderline brilliance. The bellowing bonhomie between the two girls is sustained in the bathroom.

Loo, karo baat!

In the first episode the two girls are locked in a filthy train toilet with a cop insistently banging on the door . The girls smoke pot and share confidences. Inexplicably they seem unable to get out of the toilet without bargaining with the cop who leers about the two girls doing unmentionable things in the toilet.

We never see the cops.Sorry, men not allowed in this series.

Here the writing(by Ratnabala Bhattacharjee and Neha Kaul Mehra) suggests it’s okay for the girls to discuss boobs and vaginas to demolish the gender barriers . It’s another matter that guys when they get together don’t discuss their dicks. The ongoing obsession with bodily fluids(Piku gone amok) continues in the second episode where the two ‘bro buddies’ are now locked in a bathroom in an apartment block . The commode gets clogged and the bathroom is flooded while one of the girls Khanna(Shreya Dhanwanthary) undertakes  a pregnancy test.

So is  Khanna pregnant?

Frankly. I didn’t give  adman.I really couldn’t bring myself to care about these two rebels without a  pause .

Significantly there are no male members in this web series. It’s like watching two women sniff cocaine just to prove they are ballsy.

But where is the equality in behaving like the men?

Rating: **