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

Food for Thought

My Mirror column:

Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi reminded me of the role of food in her English- Vinglish.

I didn't go into Dear Zindagi expecting to find connections with English-Vinglish. But the more I saw of Alia Bhatt's Kaira, the more I began to feel that Gauri Shinde had channelled one of the primary concerns of her 2012 debut into her 2016 film as well — our relationships with our mothers. In English-Vinglish, Shinde kept the focus on the mother – Sridevi as the shy, smiling housewife Shashi, whose endless supply of delicious food provides both real sustenance and metaphorical weight to the thankless business of keeping the family together. 

The 2012 film was interested in Shashi's fears and insecurities, but most of these came to us filtered through her relationship with her tween daughter. So when the self-centred little girl cringed with embarrassment at her mother's inability to converse with her classmate's obliviously English-speaking mother or went into a long sulk merely because Shashi had enthusiastically conducted a conversation in Hindi with her Malayali Christian teacher, we found ourselves reluctantly identifying with her – only to later feel joyfully empowered when the film finally allowed us to cheer Shashi on, instead of just being her unseeing, drag-her-down detractors.

In Dear Zindagi, the perspective is reversed. It is the daughter – Alia Bhatt's Kaira alias Koko – through whose eyes we are meant to view the world, and although Kaira is a lovely twenty-something rather than a plump tween, her attitude to her mother does indeed seem quite similar to the one we saw in English-Vinglish. Four times out of five, when her middle-aged mother calls her, Kaira can't be bothered to take the call. When she does take it, she is almost always bored or annoyed, and sometimes downright rude.

And food, again, is key to this fraught mother-daughter relationship. “Always khana, khana, kya pakana hai... what do you like to eat? Either woh meri asli ma nahi hai, ya apni yaaddasht kho chuki hai! [It's always food, food, what should I cook, what do you like... either she isn't my real mother, or she's lost her memory],” Kaira cribs loudly to her gang of friends.

There is a definite resonance between the taken-for-granted-ness of Shashi in English-Vinglish and that of Kaira's mother here. But since it is Kaira that Shinde wishes us to feel for, the script goes on to more than justify her irritation with her mother. It turns out that being asked what she would like to eat irritates Kaira not so much because she doesn't have preferences but because she does – but she expects her mother to know them.

Food gets several more references in Shinde's script. When we meet Kaira, she has a stable, sweet, loving boyfriend whom the more exciting Kunal Kapoor mocks (with only barely suppressed jealousy) as “the bawarchi”. It turns out that the man in question (Angad Bedi) is a restauranteur – a metaphor for something real and sustaining and solid? And though the film doesn't stress this, the one time we see him, he has laid out what appears to be a grand meal of several courses for his beloved. Kaira, however, only really drinks a bit of the fancy wine before making an awkward confession that ends up in her having to leave both the man and the meal midway.

Almost immediately after, we see her wolfing down a plate of streetside chow mein from a cart that announces itself as Taj Chinese. Bhatt is very effective here, conveying a sense of being not hungry so much as desperate, as if the food is meant to fill some internal vacuum. The wholesome and proper meal has also been replaced by something unhealthy, attractive precisely for its unwholesomeness, echoing her character's almost-deliberate jilting of the 'marriage material' guy for an impulsive dalliance with a much less predictable commodity.

But even as one thinks that thought, a little beggar boy has appeared on the scene, and the half-eaten plate of greasy noodles has been passed on to him.

Food is not the only consumable that plays a role in Shinde's script. A rather in-your-face product placement for eBay is incorporated into the graph of Alia's character – even as she distances herself from emotional investment, we see her purchasing complicated items of clothing with a click on her phone that combines distractedness with a strange and absolute focus.

In a moment meant to invoke laughter, she responds to her friend Jackie's recognising the jacket she's wearing as being something she had in school by saying with savage irony: “I can also have a long-term relationship!”

Still later, we listen as Shah Rukh Khan – perfectly cast as a charming and unconventional therapist with an air of infectious amusement – conjures up the most marvellous metaphor for trying out relationships in order to decide which person is right for you: choosing a chair. “I have a new kursi,” announces Kaira a couple of sessions later. “Comfortable?” asks SRK.

It is a powerful metaphor, one that successfully rids romantic/sexual relationships of the moral baggage that most young women find themselves lugging around. But I am left with the niggling feeling that comparing people to objects cannot quite be the innocuous thing that Shinde's advertising-shaped brain wishes us to see it as. Maybe that ought to be the subject of Mr Khan's next therapy session.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11th Dec 2016.

Film Review: English Vinglish

My review of English-Vinglish:

“My wife, she was born to make laddoos!” says the grinning husband to the white boy who’s being inducted into the family. The white boy, whose name is Kevin, has just taken his first-ever bite of a moist, delicious little globe of motichur goodness produced by the aforementioned wife, Shashi, and he looks suitably overwhelmed with delight. Then the camera moves across to Shashi, and that single fluid moment, as we watch her face silently transform from happy to tremulous to brave, encapsulates everything that the film wants to show us.

What Gauri Shinde’s debut film insists on showing us is so deliberately unspectacular, so quiet and dull and taken-for-granted, that when we see it in real life (and we see it all the time), we merely avert our eyes. It is the predicament of the person whose personhood is summarily dismissed by a refusal to value the work they do—casually, perhaps without malice—but resulting in no less cruelty than if it were intentional.

Because English-Vinglish, despite its name, is not just about English. English here is a placeholder. Being fluent in English, in the sadly skewed universe of contemporary India, automatically codes you as modern, fashionable, worthy of respect. Not being fluent in it relegates you to the back room: a second-class citizen unworthy of display.

Dibakar Banerjee’s films – Oye Lucky most of all, but also Pitobash Tripathy’s character in Shanghai­ ­– have given us what are perhaps Hindi cinema’s most nuanced commentaries on English as a marker of social class. What Shinde does in English-Vinglish is very different, not just because her style involves broader strokes and a happier, more feel-good mood— but because the domain she chooses to set her film in is the family.

Shashi is, first and foremost, a wife and mother, and Shinde’s masterstroke is to create a character whose fears and conflicts and insecurities are almost never a consequence of direct assaults made by the wider social world. Her experience of the world comes to her filtered through her husband and children.

So it is Shashi’s own daughter who is embarrassed and angry at Shashi’s inability to understand her classmate’s English-speaking mother—the classmate’s mother seems, at worst, oblivious. It is the same daughter who sulks for hours because Shashi speaks to her teacher in Hindi while the Malayali Christian teacher himself seems quite charmed by this woman who unselfconsciously talks to him about banana chips and wants to know if her daughter is not just a good student but also a popular one. The loyal clients she’s built up for her high-quality home-made laddoos are glad to have a friendly chat when she makes her delivery rounds in person. It is her husband’s lackadaisical dismissal of her excitement about the day’s sales that silences her.

So it makes complete sense when Shashi, at the film’s end, describes her view of family as a little world within the wider world, a space in which you ought to be held safe from the judgements and cruelties of the wider world. It is as close to a statement of worldview as a Hindi film heroine has ever been allowed to come, and whether you think of it as beautifully hopeful, or sadly, simplistically delusional, it is unlikely that you will come away unmoved.

Because in the deliberate simplicity of its canvas—and its protagonist—lies the strength of Gauri Shinde’s film. By refusing to situate the vexed question of English in a larger socio-political context, by focusing its attention on the home, it does simplify the issue—but it also holds up a mirror to what must be the most mundane, most neglected aspects of our social lives: how we treat our mothers.

And yet, the reason why English-Vinglish is so successful is because it is careful not to underline its chosen subject too heavily. Shashi is not above the occasional well-aimed barb—“Oh, main bhool gayi, important baatein toh sirf English mein hi hoti hain na?”—but her deepest wounds are ones she hugs tightly to herself. Our sense of Shashi’s intense privacy, her shyness, helps the film steer clear of melodrama, and lends itself rather beautifully to the few moments when she does open up. It seems entirely fitting that she speaks her heart out only to a man who does not understand her words.

That besotted Frenchman (Mehdi Nebbou) is one of the people in Shashi’s English class, a cheerfully updated version of Mind Your Language that provides the film with most of its lighter moments, via a slightly caricatured but affectionately drawn collection of immigrants—a Pakistani cab driver, a Tamilian techie, a Spanish-speaking nanny, a young Chinese girl, a largely silent African man—all struggling to improve their English.

The New York segment is necessarily shot with the eyes of the dazzled outsider—all skyscrapers and downtown views— but Shinde also manages to fill it with nicely-observed moments that anyone who has ever negotiated the terrifying newness of any (Western) city will immediately identify with: the minor but life-altering trials—and triumphs—of making Metrocards work, finding your way to an interview, placing an order in a café without holding up the queue.

But eventually, it is Sridevi, with her trademark winsome girlishness of old now beautifully balanced by a new quiet dignity, who makes us experience each of these triumphs as her own. Go, cheer her on.

Published in Firstpost, here.