Starting again is difficult at any age. Starting again after decades of marriage, while facing financial uncertainty, community judgement, a fractured relationship with your daughter and an abusive husband determined to maintain control, is another matter entirely. Designed by Preeti, directed by Gayatri Bajpai, tackles that situation through the story of a woman discovering that escaping a marriage is only the beginning of reclaiming the life she wants.
At the centre is Preeti Kumar (Rashmi Rustagi), a talented dressmaker whose creativity provides an immediate glimpse of an identity that has become buried beneath her marriage. The 93-minute feature opens with Preeti working at her sewing machine while an answering-machine message from her daughter Mallika (Shavya Samala) congratulates her parents on their wedding anniversary. What should be a celebration soon exposes the reality behind the respectable exterior of Preeti and Ajay’s marriage.
At their anniversary party, Ajay (Jay Charan) introduces his wife to his young secretary, Kim (Vikki Beretta). Preeti immediately senses what is happening between them, and Ajay’s behaviour does little to disguise it. When she confronts him afterwards about his affair and the humiliation of behaving so blatantly in front of their guests, he responds by striking her across the face.
It is an important moment because Designed by Preeti isn’t interested in treating Ajay’s infidelity as the sole reason for the marriage collapsing. The affair is part of a much wider pattern of control, humiliation and abuse. When Preeti decides she has had enough, the question becomes not simply whether she can leave him, but whether the people surrounding her will allow her to do so without making her pay a social price.
Her friends provide two very different perspectives. Sonia (Anna Khaja) supports Preeti leaving Ajay, while Revathi (Sangeeta Agrawal) initially represents a much more traditional attitude towards marriage and family. Preeti is told that she cannot simply leave and that what happened was “just a slap”, effectively minimising the violence and placing responsibility for preserving the marriage back upon the victim.
That response is among the film’s more uncomfortable moments because the physical assault itself isn’t the only damaging thing taking place. Being told to accept it exposes another obstacle confronting Preeti: the attitudes of people who believe maintaining a marriage and avoiding community scandal should take precedence over her safety and happiness.
Designed by Preeti Explores Abuse Beyond Physical Violence
Domestic abuse isn’t limited to physical assault, and Designed by Preeti becomes stronger as it demonstrates the different ways Ajay attempts to retain power after Preeti begins resisting him. She changes the locks, but that doesn’t end his involvement in her life. When Ajay confronts her from outside the house, separated from Preeti by a sheet of glass, he threatens to turn their daughter against her by portraying Preeti as unstable.
He subsequently begins doing exactly that. Mallika returns home questioning whether her mother is actually the one having an affair, having heard a very different account from her father. At the same time, Preeti discovers that invitations are disappearing and customers are cancelling dress orders as Ajay’s version of events spreads through their community.
The result is a film that understands coercive behaviour as something capable of continuing after physical separation. Ajay can no longer dictate everything that happens inside the house, so other relationships become weapons. Preeti’s bond with her daughter, her friendships, reputation and ability to earn money all become areas through which pressure can still be applied.
That makes the film’s subject particularly significant. The supporting material supplied with the film cites research indicating substantial levels of intimate partner violence affecting women in India and South Asian diaspora communities, while also identifying social stigma, financial dependence, isolation and pressure to preserve family honour as potential barriers to seeking help. Those broader issues shouldn’t be used to stereotype an entire community, but they provide important context for the particular pressures the screenplay explores through Preeti’s experience.
The question sometimes directed towards victims of abusive relationships, “Why don’t they just leave?”, is therefore far too simplistic. Designed by Preeti spends much of its running time showing why leaving can be a process rather than a single decision. Preeti has to contend with emotional ties, community expectations, her daughter’s anger, financial realities and a husband who continues trying to exert influence even when she attempts to establish independence.
One particularly telling development comes when Ajay offers financial support for Preeti’s business ambitions. On the surface, it could be interpreted as generosity or reconciliation. Preeti eventually recognises that accepting the money could provide another route through which he retains a degree of control over her future.
Fashion consequently becomes much more than an attractive backdrop for the story. Dressmaking is something that belongs to Preeti. It is a talent and passion through which she can begin establishing an identity independent of Ajay, and that makes her professional development an important part of her emotional journey.
It also gives Designed by Preeti one of its greatest visual strengths.
Costume designer Alice Xavier deserves considerable praise for work that repeatedly pops from the screen. The traditional Indian clothing is frequently filled with vivid colours, intricate patterns and striking combinations that give the film a rich visual character. Against the comparatively ordinary environments surrounding the characters, those colours can be gorgeous, and the clothing naturally becomes even more important within a story whose protagonist expresses herself through fashion.
Cinematographer Lokesh Babu Akula captures those colours beautifully. Designed by Preeti is a polished production throughout, with clean photography and a professional visual presentation that allows Xavier’s costume work to make an especially strong impression. The fashion elements don’t feel decorative or disconnected from the narrative because clothes are central to Preeti rediscovering what she can accomplish for herself.
Rashmi Rustagi, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Yashna Malhotra and Wendy Moulton-Tate, carries the film confidently. Preeti has to move through fear, humiliation, uncertainty and anger without suddenly transforming into an entirely different person the moment she decides to leave her husband. Rustagi makes that gradual change believable.
That is crucial because the screenplay allows Preeti to have doubts. Independence doesn’t immediately solve everything, nor does escaping Ajay erase the consequences of spending years within their relationship. Her daughter remains a source of pain, her social circle changes and pursuing fashion professionally brings its own uncertainty. There are moments when the easier option might appear to be returning to the security she already knows, however unhealthy that security was.
Jay Charan has the less sympathetic assignment as Ajay, but his performance works because the character’s behaviour extends beyond the initial violence. Ajay attempts to shape how other people see Preeti, and his interference with Mallika is particularly cruel because he understands the importance of that relationship to his wife. Charan makes him appropriately difficult to like without requiring every scene to become an explosive confrontation.
The supporting women are equally important. Anna Khaja’s Sonia offers Preeti the kind of support she desperately needs, while Sangeeta Agrawal’s Revathi provides a very different perspective. Revathi’s initial response is frustrating, but it gives the film an opportunity to dramatise the competing pressures being placed upon Preeti rather than reducing the entire conflict to husband versus wife.
Shavya Samala also has a difficult position as Mallika. She doesn’t initially have access to everything the audience knows about her parents’ marriage, allowing Ajay to exploit that gap. Her anger towards her mother therefore adds another emotional consequence to the abuse rather than functioning simply as another obstacle inserted into Preeti’s journey.
Fortunately, Bajpai doesn’t allow the film’s heavy subject to make all 93 minutes relentlessly miserable. There is warmth within Preeti’s friendships, and her developing companionship with Harminder “Harry” Singh (Puneet) introduces the possibility that beginning again doesn’t have to mean spending the rest of her life alone. The screenplay ultimately has considerably more interest in Preeti’s future than in repeatedly punishing her for her past.
That hopeful approach suits the film. Designed by Preeti isn’t constructed as a grim examination of domestic violence in which suffering is the destination. Abuse is the circumstance from which its protagonist is attempting to emerge, while the larger story concerns independence, friendship, family, creativity and the possibility of reinvention later in life.
There are occasions when the drama is somewhat broad, and some developments are easier to anticipate than others. With themes this important, a little more subtlety in places could have made certain emotional moments even stronger. However, the film remains engaging because the central journey is sincere and Rustagi gives us somebody whose progress we want to follow.
Editors Brian Feeney and Alex Zajicek keep the story moving at a comfortable pace, while Catherine Joy and Mark Rhodes provide the music. At a little over an hour and a half, the film has enough space to show Preeti rebuilding different parts of her life without becoming unnecessarily drawn out.
There is also something refreshing about placing a woman in her 50s at the centre of this particular story. Rustagi has said that the project deliberately centres an older woman and features principal roles played largely by performers over 50 who are people of colour. Preeti isn’t presented as someone whose opportunities for ambition, romance or reinvention have expired. Her age is instead part of what makes starting again difficult and, ultimately, meaningful.
Director Gayatri Bajpai handles that journey with considerable warmth. Designed by Preeti deals with physical violence, coercive behaviour, infidelity, social judgement and damaged family relationships, yet it ultimately refuses to define its protagonist solely by what has happened to her. Preeti is also a mother, friend, designer and woman with ambitions that existed before Ajay’s control and can continue beyond it.
The title therefore becomes particularly fitting. Preeti spends the film designing more than clothes. She gradually begins deciding what her own future should look like rather than allowing her husband or community to design it for her.
Designed by Preeti is a well-made and emotionally satisfying drama anchored by a strong performance from Rashmi Rustagi and some particularly impressive costume work from Alice Xavier. Its subject is serious, but Bajpai balances the darker material with friendship, humour, colour and hope, producing a film about abuse that is ultimately more interested in survival and rebuilding than despair.
Most importantly, Preeti’s journey never suggests that leaving is as easy as simply walking through a door. The film recognises the emotional, social and practical forces capable of keeping somebody trapped long after they know a relationship is damaging them. By the time its heroine begins reclaiming her creativity and independence, Designed by Preeti has become an uplifting reminder that starting again later in life isn’t the end of somebody’s story. It can be the point at which they finally begin writing it for themselves.
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