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- Roopa Ganguly's Mahamaya is a worthy contender to lead any listing of memorable women characters from Ghosh's abundant array of some seriously multi-dimensional female protagonists seen on celluloid in recent times. Ganguly rekindles memories of her fiery act of Draupadi in B R Chopra's Mahabharat through her blow hot, blow cold performance. The film's narrator may be the British artist, but hers is the character that drives its most dramatic moments and through whom the audience is warned about the catastrophe in waiting. From a jealous, wasted aging wife in the beginning, she seizes screen presence with her every appearance, lacing it with new untapped facets to her personality. To her husband's employees, she is like an incarnation of the goddess-provider, to Jashomati she is the nurturer and to the voyeuristic exploitative priests, she is the ultimate sexual tease. In the zamindar's "antarmahal" abounding with women resigned to their fates, she is a thinking, living, sexual being, who sets her own agendas and seeks her own pleasures, almost like a man. (en)
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