This is Bhopal at its most basic strata. Again this sequence has a direct echo in Parched where Tannishtha Chatterjee sponges the abused wife Radhika Aptes breasts.But the film falls short of being genre-defining.The men of course are blinded by the floodlights of patriarchy. But the explicitness of her conversations with her sex-object(interesting reversal of traditional roles here) elicits more giggles than shock from us.The most unsympathetic protagonist is Leela, played with persuasive gumption by Kriti Kumra. Konkona Sen Sharma has the most sympathetic and therefore most difficult role as an oppressed Muslim wife who gets raped every night before sleep.What does Leela want? I cant say. The film resolutely refuses to capture the films beauty, focusing instead on the crowded stifling lanes and gullies where furtive sex is undertaken in community toilets and where women have to toil over sewing machines and microwaves while father, husbands, boyfriends and lovers sow their wild oats and come home in time for the cornflakes.Sorry, not happening.And I thought this line of spousal thought went out of fashion with Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. Shrivastava whose earlier and only film Turning 30 only hinted at the post-feminist explosion of Lipstick Under The Burkha, takes charge with an all-knowing confidence of four women from different walks of life and belonging to separate generations. Sushant Singh as her insensitive husband shines in a thankless role even when he has to utter banal lines like, ‘Biwi ho shauhar ban-ne ki koshish mat karo.The youngest rebel of the quartet Rehana(newcomer Plabita Borthakur, just about adequate) throws off her burkha , steals Britney boots from malls and parties wildly with girls from homes far more privileged than hers and romances a drugged drummer(Shashank Arora, dutifully dazed). And when her mortifying secret life is discovered by her shamed father we are supposed to feel protective towards Rehana. It moves with seductive stealth through the lives of the four women but does not eventually evoke the memorable images from the great feminist and post-feminist films of Indian cinema including Parched.This film is actually about four women leading dual lives and hiding dark dirty secrets from the men in their lives.To their credit the vast cast has a blast breaking one kind of gender stereotyping that such films breaks, and also dodging the trap that a film of this rhinestone mixed embroidery machines Manufacturers nature lays down for actors who have to talk about condoms casually . JhaFilm: Lipstick Under My Burkha; Director: Alankrita Shrivastava; Starring: Ratna Pathak Shah, Konkona Sen Sharma, Aahana Kumra, Plabita Borthakur; Rating: Here is a film that deserves a rousing ovation for bringing out the sexual fantasies and other unspoken yearnings of four middleclass women in a non-metropolitan milieu eking each out an exciting existence from the hard brutal raw material of her inert life. Ratna Pathak Shah is expectedly outstanding as the repressed Bua who has phone-sex with her swimming instructor(Jagal Singh Solanki, excellent). She manages to make the characters inviolabe coyness a cute cocoon awaiting metamorphosis.