A standard synopsis of The Help might sound terribly boring: a recent college graduate returns to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi and decides to write a book based on the anecdotes of the black domestic staff that tend to the needs of the uppity white Southern upper-class. A film with such a description could easily be a feel-good, irritatingly candy-like homily on right and wrong, north vs south, race and gender and, of course, differences.

While the film, adapted from a novel by Kathryn Stockett, is made to appeal to a large audience it sidesteps the general pitfalls of crowd-pleasers by managing to delight and shock, therefore resonating in our minds till much after. Here in Nepal, the film is a gentle reminder of the horrors that people can inflict upon each other even in times of peace, women against women, race against race.

This is largely due the excellent dialogue, the humour and sensitivity that runs throughout the story, and the spectacular ensemble cast. We have Emma Stone as Skeeter Phelan, the college graduate intent on making her name as a journalist by recounting the stories of Aibileen Clark (played by the soulful, thoughtful Viola Davis), Minny Jackson (a feisty Octavia Spencer), and her own nanny Constantine Jefferson (acted with warmth and grace by Cicely Tyson) among others.

Skeeter could so easily have been a paradigm of the annoying Tintin-like journalist focused only on getting "the story" but her humour and her sass make her much much more. A tad awkward, unfortunately a bit too brainy, and supposedly not very pretty (impossible with a face like Emma Stone's) Skeeter learns to give as good as she gets from her impossibly catty debutante peer group as she slowly starts to realize that being different, and independent, in the deep South in the 1960s also means one has to be that much braver to stand up for one's beliefs. At that time, being black and doing the wrong thing could still get you lynched, being white and standing up for the civil rights movement could get you shot.

It is impossible to describe here all the wonderful stories and characters within this rich and delightful film. Its power lies in its fearless portrayal of the horrors and indignities that these stoic black women suffered as they raised the children of white families (most of whom go on to become horrid replicas of their parents), and its ability to bring to life an assortment of fully rounded characters that braved their way through such malice and indignities, great and small, with humour, with decency and with spirit.

This is a story about the strength of women. However, it does not mean that it is a film only for women. Any good story ought to be able to transcend gender, class and race. "The Help" is such a story. Although it was made in a supposedly post-feminist, post-racial Occidental world, even in the West the memory of racism and the presence of sexism in near and painful enough that it ought to be memorialised still.

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