Dolly (Konkona Sen Sharma) is seemingly happily married to Amit (Aamir Bashir). They live in Noida and plan to move to a swankier home soon. Her cousin Kitty (Bhumi Pednekar) comes to live with them from Bihar but thanks to Amit's lecherous ways, moves out soon in a shady PG and starts working in a company which specialises in 'friendship' chats. She finds a bohemian spirit (Kubra Sait) as her flatmate and opens up somewhat about life.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, let's smash patriarchy, me and you," these words resonated with many women when Rhea Chakraborty proudly wore them on her T-shirt while she was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) for allegedly procuring drugs for her boyfriend Sushant Singh Rajput. The words again reminded the world of how women and their aspirations hold no place in this patriarchal world.

Hailing from a small town Dharbanga (Bihar), Dolly (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Kaajal (Bhumi Pednekar) are cousin sisters tackling their issues and hoping to find an escape in the city of Greater Noida. Not so happily married Dolly combats s*xual tension with her husband Amit (Aamir Bashir). At the same time, Kaajal is on her way to becoming Kitty with the help of a call centre that sells romance.

An unapologetic and unabashed girl gets the first whiff of freedom and realises it comes with a price. But she is ready to pay it because freedom is indeed expensive for many in this country. In one scene, Bhumi Pednekar's character Kajal says that she is from a small village and belongs to a backward class, thus knows what coming to a big city and living life on own terms means to her.

If Lipstick Under My Burkha looked at female sexuality and rebellion in the face of patriarchy and misogyny, Writer-Director Alankrita Shrivastava's Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare just wants to let her be. Repression isn't so much of an issue here as are the dilemmas of resisting propriety. A woman's role is so deeply entrenched in society, it takes a fair bit of unsavoury experience for her to break out of the shackles of conditioning and stigma.

The colour scheme is straight out of a gift card shop. This being a woman's picture, passionate pinks and blood-hot reds abound. But the prevailing mood in Alankrita Shrivastava's Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is actually a mild shade of blue.

The film opens in a House of Horrors. A 21-year-old small-town girl, Kaajal Kumari, in the middle of the ride, complains to her Noida-based older cousin Dolly Yadav of an inappropriate act by the latter's husband only to be have her misgivings dismissed casually. But that is not where Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare loses its way. Its stuffed monsters and ogres are elsewhere.

After battling the world for Lipstick Under My Burkha, Alankrita Shrivastava got a relatively easier release for Dolly Kitty Aur Chamakte Sitare. After a big debut at the Busan International Film Festival last year, the film was to arrive in Indian movie theatres this year. But a pandemic later, Dolly and Kitty's stars have descended upon our Netflix accounts. Good for us because of all things, Dolly Kitty Aur Chamakte Sitare is not worth catching the coronavirus for.

Female desire is one of those thorny issues that mainstream Hindi cinema has always had difficulty touching upon: when touch per se is so hard to show on screen without all kinds of self-righteous moral stakeholders making a noise, anything that involves grown men and women and the thing between them becomes a toughie.

Dolly aka Radha Yadav (Konkona Sensharma) is a middle-class woman in Noida working a clerical job while managing two kids, her husband Amit (Aamir Bashir) and the instalments due on their dream flat. Her cousin Kaajal (Bhumi Pednekar) comes to stay with the couple. She soon shifts to a hostel to escape Amit's wandering hands and ends up employed by an app that offers men lightly sexual telephone conversations with women in a bid to persuade them to spend money on the company's gift shop.

'Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare' calls out the hypocrisy around seemingly happy marriages right at the beginning, when Kajal (Bhumi Pednekar) tells her cousin, Dolly (Konkona Sen Sharma) that her husband Amit (Aamir Bashir) has been hitting on her. When Dolly insists Kajal may have misunderstood his friendly, protective behaviour, she spells it out for her cousin, "Amit ji humse sex karna chahte hain."

There is a nostalgic feel to the title of director Alankrita Shrivastava's (Lipstick Under My Burkha, Made In Heaven) new Netflix film Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare. It gives a sense of those times when moving to big cities was the only way to survive and live a comparatively dignified life, especially in the Hindi heartland. It reminds you of many fantastic stories in contemporary Hindi literature.