One of several acclaimed documentaries by Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, see Monday, October 16), India Cabaret explores the division between the "respectable" and the "corrupt" stereotypes of women in India today. Following the lives of strippers at a nightclub in suburban Bombay, the film shows ordinary women being transformed into "queens of the night" to feed the fantasies of men who then return home to their proper wives. In candid interviews the dancers express their mixed feelings toward their profession, which makes them at once desirable and socially outcast, but requires as well a certain resilience and sense of independence. An equally strong presence in the film are the wives, as the film follows one patron home to his middle-class family. His wife is as articulate about her narrow role-that of chaste and submissive wife and mother-as the strippers are about theirs in this sensitive and unsentimental look at women in a patriarchal society.