Deepanjana Pal
Crew tells the story of three flight attendants, at different stages in their career, who take to smuggling because they haven’t been paid for months.
With lazy one-liners and punchlines that are frequently mired in tasteless classism, the humour in Crew has too little sparkle. Every now and then, characters trot out dialogues that punch down at women who occupy lower rungs of the social pyramid.
The humour pivots upon disrespecting the labour of women who are considered “low class”, and distancing Crew’s heroines from “those” type of women.
Under the forced banter and a plot that steadily loses coherence while leaning on ridiculous coincidences, the subtext of Crew is to explore what on-screen women can do if they’re given the space to behave like their male counterparts.
Crew imposes the patterns of bromances and male humour upon its women characters. The fit is awkward and unimaginative, constricting the idea of femininity by mapping it upon masculinity.
If Crew had just been able to show a truly authentic female friendship, it wouldn’t need anything else to justify itself. That’s it. The fact of a female friendship, covering everything from resistance to conflict to wish fulfilment, that’s the message.