Spoilers ahead…
The story of a woman who experiences so many downs in life and compensates with so many ups while playing should have been more unique.
Quick, name five women cricketers! This question is put to a cricket-crazy common man in an early scene in Srijit Mukherji’s Shabaash Mithu – but it could be addressed to any one of us. This lack of identity, this lack of recognition is the centre of Priya Aven’s screenplay. “Hum bhi to India ke liye khelte hain,” Mithali Raj says. We play for India, too. You feel her frustration, especially given how celebrated male cricketers are. The other issue is sexism/patriarchy. At a press conference, a journalist asks Mithali who her favourite male cricketer is. She asks if he would ask a male cricketer a similar question about a favourite female cricketer. Plus, there are various physical and social aspects – like menstruation, or marriage pressure – that make a sporting career so much more difficult for an Indian woman. But that’s what makes success so much sweeter. The opening credits play over a montage of boys and men playing cricket. At the end, Mithali is surrounded by a sea of little girls who wear white uniforms and who want to be her.
You can read the rest of the review here:
https://www.galatta.com/hindi/movie/review/shabaash-mithu/
And you can watch the video review here:
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Anu Warrier
July 15, 2022
BR, the lipsync is off in the video.
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Madan
August 23, 2022
A frustrating biopic as you have described, because it is quite promising and refreshingly different in the first half and the second half is… um, stock footage of the 2017 women’s world cup? Lol. I understand budget constraints but they could have cut the monotony by staging more backroom scenes about tactical ins and outs or the dressing room tension.
Makers of sports biopics should watch Borg McEnroe or Rush to understand how to capture not just the thrills but the emotions, the highs and lows of sport. Even King Richard is well made that way. 83 got there in places like the sheer low of the defeat to WI in the second round robin and the near death against Zimbabwe. Shabaash Mithu unfortunately does as badly at capturing the emotions of sport as it does well in capturing the persons behind the sport.
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Karthik
August 24, 2022
I was quite diappointed with this film. I agree, it had its moments, like the one where the ground was replaced with backgrounds of the players, or the little moment under the stars. And the backroom scenes had some snappy chemistry amongst the actors. But otherwise, there was a “generic”ness to it all especially once the film moved to the national cricket team. This is a two decade career of a cricketing icon that was shown on screen, surely there’s some specificity about the sport, the characters, the conflicts that was worth underlining other than the broad “men’s team gets all the glory even in defeat”. Even that never hit as hard as it should have.
A Kanaa for all its flaws had more emotional heft than this film did.
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