Women on the verge

My Mirror column:

What might we learn from Hindi films directed by women filmmakers in the year gone by?

Anu Menon (dir: Waiting); Leena Yadav (dir: Parched); Gauri Shinde (dir: Dear Zindagi)

2016 might just have been the year of the woman director in Bollywood. Don't get me wrong: the proportion of women directing films is still microscopic — out of 225 Hindi films released in 2016, only nine were directed by women, while one (Sanam Teri Kasam) had a woman (Radhika Rao) co-directing with a man (Vinay Sapru). And that tiny number isn't particularly different from what it was in 2015. (Two of the few established female directors in Bollywood — Zoya Akhtar and Meghna Gulzar — had releases in 2015: Dil Dhadakne Do and Talwar respectively. As did another woman making her second feature, Madhureeta Anand, who followed up her 2009 feature debut Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye with 2015's Kajarya, on the necessarily worthy subject of female foeticide.)

But for some reason, the work of women stood out for me this year. Perhaps it was the fact that the women who came out with films this year aren’t names to reckon with, and unlike Zoya Akhtar and Meghna Gulzar, don't have filmi fathers. Perhaps it was the fact that many of these women were making their feature film debuts, making it feel like a new crop of filmmakers. Or perhaps it was simply that they managed to represent a range of cinematic styles and interests while also providing a perspective that seemed distinctively female.

The procession began with fanfare in January. Shefali Bhushan's debut Jugni had a female protagonist grappling with creative ambition and social difference. Sudha Kongara's sports-themed romance Saala Khadoos — while being an overcooked Hindi version of Kongara's simultaneously released Tamil film Irudhi Suttru — gave us a charming heroine who was convincingly brattish and even more convincing in her romantic coming of age (I would, for instance, choose Ritika Singh's hot-headed, kooky Madhi over Kajol's precious Anjali from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai any day).

February offered more predictable fare from women directors: Sanam Re directed by Divya Khosla Kumar (wife of T-Series music moghul Bhushan Kumar), and Sanam Teri Kasam. Then came Jasmine Moses D'Souza's One Night Stand, starring Sunny Leone, which I missed then but now can't wait to watch, especially after reading an interview where D'Souza asks all-important questions about sexual double standards in our society: “For a man, we justify by saying that he has his needs. Can't a woman have her needs? Can't she get carried away? And if she does, does it make her bad?

In May, came Anu Menon's Waiting, a quietly atmospheric drama that pitches an older man (Naseeruddin Shah) against a younger woman (Kalki Koechlin). Menon, who debuted with 2012's London Paris New York, here, crafts an affecting intergenerational relationship whose instantaneous intensity is made entirely believable by both protagonists' partners battling death in a Kochi hospital. In different ways, Jugni, Saala Khadoos and Waiting all challenge the boundaries of who women can fall in love with.

Leena Yadav's Parched is a much more self-consciously feminist take on women's lives and their sexual needs — its occasional missteps in the seductive tourist-y direction somewhat compensated for by a rare, affectionate depiction of female friendship, its frank bawdiness a rare treat on the Indian screen.

I was apparently among the rare people to enjoy Baar Baar Dekho, directed by first-timer Nitya Mehra. Her use of a comic time-travel premise to portray a checked-out husband seemed a great way to communicate with audiences who may not have taken too well to a flat-out melodramatic message about what long-term relationships mean: I met an Uber driver watching the film on loop and pondering the too-little-time he spent with his wife.

Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, one of the year's finest films, is not centred on women, but both Amruta Subhash's housewife who finds herself liberated from a domineering husband and Tannishtha Chatterjee's quiet girl blossoming in a secret romance are superb characters. Although not the main focus, Subhash's relationship with her mother-in-law and Tannishtha's with her mother portray complexity with rare economy.

In Saala Khadoos, two sisters battle each other for a man's attention, which seems to stand for the world's praise, while in Parched, women strive to keep their connection alive despite being given sharply different statuses by a male world. In Waiting, Koechlin's Tara angrily unpicks a female friend's pious platitudes. Meanwhile two very different films — Ashwini Iyer Tiwari's Nil Battey Sannata and Gauri Shinde's Dear Zindagi — dealt movingly with fraught mother-daughter relationships. The strength and tension of relationships between women might well be the theme that women directors brought to the table last year.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Jan 8, 2017

Again and again and again

My Mirror column:

A plot-heavy romance uses time travel to look at love in the long term — which means the here and now.

Nitya Mehra's Baar Baar Dekho is the second Hindi film by a woman director to hit theatres in consecutive weeks - and it shows. Last week saw the release of Ruchika Oberoi's Island City, whose darkly comic provocations came lined with deep insight into how it feels to be human these days. This week's film is much more consciously 'mainstream' -- a love story between two good looking people with the predictably Punjabi Khatri names that Bollywood clings to with such tenacity. But the relationship between Diya Kapoor (Katrina Kaif) and Jai Varma (Sidharth Malhotra) is seen through a woman's eyes, and that makes it different from most relationships we've seen on the Hindi film screen.

There's a cool time-travel plot, which helps keeps things light. The future as a way to add visual interest -- Bahai-temple-shaped electric cremations and hologram-style projections of phone calls -- can sometimes seem lame, but it isn't too distracting. On a more emotional plane, Jai's recurring befuddlement at having been catapulted into some time he doesn't recognize makes sure that laughs are always around the corner. But make no mistake, this is a film with urgent, important things to say about love - not the sweep-you-off-your-feet, first-flush adoration that Hindi films have helped turn into our collective imagination, but the show-up-and-stay-around variety that seems to be as hard to find in life as it is on screen.

The characterisation isn't particularly subtle. So the cerebral man who wants to live his life 'logically' is represented by an actual mathematician-—frantically crunching numbers with his head even when it's his heart that's in danger. The absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he actually 'forgets' large chunks of the life he's lived. Another man, another problem: the fellow who constantly inflates his class status goes from needing to deny to his best friend that he's travelling Economy Class to having to deny to his wife that he's actually flipping burgers for a living. Meanwhile the rich businessman father-in-law's large-hearted offers of 'support' are an obvious way of showing down his son-in-law's more limited income.

But what Mehra's film maps with warmth and insight is a relationship dynamic most middle class Indian women are likely to recognize all too easily -- and let's face it, subtlety might not work too well if the idea is to get the men in the audience to see it too.

So it's probably strategic that Baar Baar Dekho hits us on the head with its portrait of the checked-out husband. The sweet-faced, mostly even-tempered Jai seems like the perfect catch -- except that he seems to spend most of his life behaving like he's trying to escape.

He's the man who's always so preoccupied with the 'big things' that every other part of the couple's life together becomes relegated to 'small stuff'-- which somehow makes it the woman's sole responsibility. I mean the man who wafts along, letting his partner take charge of all decisions about their everyday domestic arrangements and social life, because he really couldn't be bothered -- until he suddenly, angrily, is. You know, the man who all his work colleagues would agree is a nice guy, and hardworking too -- except he never seems to see that relationships at home need niceness and hard work, too.

Among the other things the film does with comic finesse is to highlight how wrong men get it when they try to define what being a good partner is. Even at the very last calamitous moment, when faced with the question 'What can I do to fix my marriage?' the always overwhelmed Jai can only come up with a negative injunction to himself: 'Don't have an affair'. Which isn't exactly wrong, Mehra's film seems to say -- but it's very far from being enough. Because being a good husband, as every woman who has ever beaten her head against her partner's incomprehension knows, can't just mean not being a 'bad' one. It isn't just about not beating up your wife, not cheating on her, or not endangering your children's lives. A healthy, happy, loving relationship needs positive words and actions—and not words and actions that are wrenched from you after seventeen reminders, but voluntary things that you do because you want to be in the relationship.

Being there for someone can't just be a theoretical thing in the back of your head, which you're sure you'll do when the time comes. Being there in a relationship means being there every day. Not just because that keeps it alive and well, but because once you stop doing it every day, you'll find you don't even notice when the time does come.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Sep 2016.