Print Email to Friend| From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 24, Dated 16 June 2012

CULTURE & SOCIETY   SPOILERS AHEAD

Almost Feminist

By Sunaina Kumar

Snow White And The Huntsman DIRECTOR Rupert Sanders STARRING Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Sam Claflin ALSO READ Depart To Exit An Oriental Bloom Juliet’s Got a Gun

IN A few years Kristen Stewart will be eligible for a Lifetime Razzie for bad acting. She pulled off the ‘stand in front of camera, bite lips helplessly’ routine through the Twilight series, and reprises her sole expression for Snow White. Her nemesis Charlize Theron, though, is ruthless and compelling. Female rivalries make for engaging drama, think Bride Wars. But that’s a chick flick, you say? So is this. It could’ve been a radical feminist interpretation, it almost is. Theron’s evil stepmother walks away with the sympathy. But Sanders settles for convention. “I’m everything you are not,” Snow White tells the queen, slotting it squarely in fairytale territory of good versus evil.

The plot we know — poisoned apple, seven dwarves, et al. Scene-stealer Chris Hemsworth plays the Huntsman and does what Bollywood heroines do in action films, provide some pretty. Snow White must pick between the two men who love her, the Huntsman and Prince William, her childhood companion. Mercifully, we are spared more lip-biting indecision from Stewart, who instead leads an army to reclaim her kingdom. The movie has been called an experiment to reclaim fairytales from generations of Disneyfication. The experiment is incomplete, yet entertaining.

Sunaina Kumar is a Special Correspondent with Tehelka.
sunaina@tehelka.com