Shakuntala Devi.
Shakuntala Devi lives like she laughs.
As a maths genius in plaits, she would have understood the value of humour early on.
As a slip of a girl, she was participating in maths shows, supporting her family by answering tough-as-nuts questions.
Shakuntala Devi, the film, dramatises the life of the maths wizard whose bold outlines are public knowledge.
A girl whose talent for maths was identified at a young age, Shakuntala supplemented her family’s dwindling resources by doing maths shows from an early age.
A fierce feminist before perhaps she even knew the word, Shakuntala lived life on her own terms.
Her testy relationship with daughter Anu (Sanya Malhotra), who wants a ‘normal’ life, forms the main conflict in the film
The film feels functional, in a race to tell us the entire story of her life while skipping over the broad strokes that made the real-life Shakuntala Devi a woman ahead of her time
The script by Nayanika Mehtani, co-written by director Anu Menon, Shakuntala Devi feels bland
Shakuntala Devi truly focusses on only two relationships of its protagonists’ life – with maths and her daughter Anu, and even they get a short shrift, with emotions lost in exposition
Vidya Balan brings a sense of vibrancy to Shakuntala – the maths genius who was a rock star at heart
A woman who never really understood the meaning of the word ‘normal’, Shakuntala Devi now gets a biopic which can only be described thus