Bombshell

*ing: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, Kate McKinnon, Connie Britton

Rated: 8/10

In #MeeToo times, Bombshell comes in handy for women fighting their wars in office. The film has been made with candour, showing the problem of sexual harassment at office as an intrinsic trap into which women continue to fall and how the magnet of power and stardom propels often them through the sheets even if it is with utmost disgust.

Bombshell portrays the scandal that happened in pro-Trump Fox News channel with its larger than life CEO has his juices flowing in utter disregard of women working for him. Now an aged patriarch who walks with a stick but is never hesitant in exploiting the next girl in line with ambition, John Lithgow portrays Fox’s life and breath Roger Ailes who has created Fox and is in many ways even bigger than its owner Rupert Murdoch.

Shit happens and it happens to the best in the business. In this case it is the star anchor and Trump bete noir Megyn Kelly played skillfully by Charleze Theron. As it turns out much later in the film, she too had passed through the Ailes room on Fox office’s iconic Second Floor inhabited by Ailes. He keeps tabs on every single thing that is happening in the newsroom, including the length of the presenters’ skirt, which incidentally had to be way above the knee. “It is the need of the visual medium,” he would tell every girl aspiring to come before the camera. That, and the threat that nothing that happened between him and the girl had to always stay in his room. Untill, of course, an aged and sidelined Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) is sacked and she decides to sue him for sexual harassment.

The good thing about the film is that it unfolds as it would have in real time. Theron, Kidman and even the young Margot Robbie who is exploited by Ailes while she is in tears play their parts to perfection, as does Connie Britton the closet lesbian in a conservative Fox environment.

The film throws up issues that are way beyond one man and is perversions. It throws up the issue of safety, corporate mechanisms allowing such horrors, the glass ceilings, the gender bias, the women against women story, the wife is always by the side angle and many other thoughts that make you angry at the state of affairs in the global corporate zone.

A lot needs to be done, not just by women who bow to the pressures to reach where they want to, but also men who are yet to give up their fiefdoms in the cocoon of patriarchal societies. Also, not all battles are brought to the book and not many cases are won, which is a worrying thing, not to mention how stated zero tolerance to sexual harassment turns out to be a farce in many an office, with the complainant being sacked or “silently removed” or “bought off”.

For the India release, meanwhile, Lionsgate tied up with the women-only social network Sheroes to throw up the bright side of victory where sexual harassment is concerned. The film was followed by a panel discussion on the issue which was decked by women professionals from all the high- pressure professions in today’s world.

In short, a movie for all to see and mull over, gender no bias.