Alia Bhatt wears sunglasses inside a dimly lit train compartment in the opening stretch of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi, and if I'm honest, the prop feels wrong for the period right away. It's a small thing but it bugged me, this slight modern smudge on a recreation of 1950s Kamathipura that has otherwise been scrubbed and polished until every cobblestone gleams like a movie set. Movies about the Bombay underworld usually stink of sweat and grease, but Bhansali prefers his squalor draped in velvet and lit by lanterns that cast long, amber shadows across walls painted the color of bruised plums. He takes Hussain Zaidi’s non-fiction book about Ganga Harjivandas, a young girl sold into a brothel who claws her way to the top of the mafia, and turns it into a theatrical pageant where even the street fights look like they were choreographed by Martha Graham. The screenplay moves in fits and starts, spending an eternity on her early humiliation before rushing through her political ascent with the breathless impatience of a student who forgot to study for a history exam. You get endless scenes of men underestimating her, followed immediately by scenes where she humiliates them with a single sharp sentence delivered over a cup of chai. It lacks the gritty, slow-drip realism of something like Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, opting instead for grand emotional gestures that belong on a proscenium stage rather than a celluloid street. Yet there is a strange, stubborn momentum to the way the narrative structures itself around her voice, which starts as a timid squeak and hardens into a rasp that can silence a room full of corrupt politicians.

Bhatt takes a role that could easily have been played as a screeching collection of clichés and finds actual humanity beneath the heavy kohl and silk saris. When she first arrives at the brothel, her eyes are wide with a deer-in-the-headlights terror that feels entirely uncalculated, stripped of movie-star vanity. She doesn't try to look glamorous when she's crying, which sounds like basic acting but is actually remarkably rare in mainstream Hindi films where tears usually double as mascara commercials. Her transition into the matriarchal boss known as Gangubai relies heavily on posture and vocal placement, dropping her register an octave and holding her chin at an angle that forces everyone else to look up at her. She shares the screen with Shantanu Maheshwari, playing her gentle-souled romantic interest Afzal, and their chemistry has a quiet, doomed sweetness that grounds the louder, more operatic moments of the picture. Maheshwari doesn't have a massive filmography to draw on, but he brings a soft, unassuming grace to the screen that prevents the relationship from feeling like a mere plot device. Vijay Raaz shows up as Razia Bai, a rival transgender don, and he plays the part with a terrifying stillness that makes you wish the script gave them more scenes to chew on together. Seema Pahwa also anchors the periphery as Sheela Aunty, bringing a lived-in exhaustion to the background of the brothel that reminds you real people used to inhabit these spaces before the director turned them into canvas for his color palette.

Sudeep Chatterjee’s cinematography treats every doorway like a picture frame, often shooting through mosquito nets or velvet curtains to create a voyeuristic distance between the audience and the misery on display. The camera tracks Gangubai through the narrow alleys of Kamathipura with a fluid, balletic grace that sometimes undercuts the violence of her environment, making the poverty look entirely too clean and composed. Every frame is saturated with reds and golds, turning a red-light district into an opulent dreamscape where the shadows are just as carefully arranged as the lighting fixtures. Sanjay Leela Bhansali also composed the music, and while the songs are generally lush and theatrical, the background score tends to repeat the same three violin motifs until they lose all emotional resonance. There is a specific drumbeat that accompanies every time Gangubai makes a triumphant entrance, and by the fourth or fifth repetition, it starts feeling less like a character motif and more like a cue telling you when to clap. The editing in the musical sequences is remarkably sharp, but the cuts during the dramatic confrontations sometimes linger a fraction of a second too long on reaction shots, telegraphing the emotional punchline before the actor has even finished their line.

The film wants to be a feminist manifesto about bodily autonomy and the right of sex workers to demand dignity, but it frequently compromises its own politics for the sake of a crowd-pleasing speech. Gangubai stands before a crowd of politicians and lectures them about their hypocrisy with the righteous fury of someone who has read a very good script, yet the movie rarely pauses to examine the actual daily horrors faced by the women working under her. It frames her as a benevolent savior who unionizes the district and fights for schools, transforming a ruthless criminal into a saintly figurehead with very little grey area in between. This is where the storytelling stumbles most, smoothing over the contradictions of a woman who protects the vulnerable while simultaneously running a massive extortion and trafficking syndicate. Indian cinema has always struggled to depict female antiheroes without eventually softening their edges into maternal archetypes, and this picture falls right into that same comfortable trap by the time the third act rolls around. You end up watching a fable about empowerment rather than a tough-minded biography, which is fine if you wanted a fairy tale set in a brothel, but leaves you hungry for something with a bit more grit under its fingernails.

There is an odd supporting actor playing a minor police inspector in the middle sequence who is so obviously dubbed by a studio artist that his mouth movements never quite match the audio track, and it pulls you right out of the illusion of 1950s Bombay. It's a minor mechanical flaw in a production that cost a fortune and employed hundreds of background extras, but those are the seams that show when a director is more interested in the grandeur of a wide shot than the texture of a conversation. Still, watching Bhatt command the screen during her speech at the Azad Maidan rally, her voice cracking with exhaustion and fury, makes you forgive a lot of the surrounding artifice. She doesn't just play a character; she builds a monument out of stubbornness and defiance, standing tall in a world designed to crush her. The picture ends on a quiet note, refusing to give you the massive fireworks display you might expect from this filmmaker, and that restraint turns out to be its most surprising asset. It's uneven, occasionally frustrating, and too in love with its own visual styling, yet it lingers in the mind long after the house lights come up.