A Feminist Fairy Tale

My Mirror column:

A picture-perfect desert village serves as the setting for Parched’s fantasy of female freedom.

Leena Yadav’s Parched, completed in 2015 and finally released in India last week courtesy Ajay Devgn, is a feminist fairy tale. By which I mean that absolutely terrible things happen to the four female protagonists — three women in their 30s, and one 15-year-old — but we know they’ll be okay in the end. And not just okay: the film allows us the pleasure of watching these women triumph over a system weighted entirely against them. This might seem to stay within the Hindi movie tradition of the happy ending. But unlike older Hindi films, Parched’s climax doesn’t force its fictional context to accommodate the heroines’ unfulfilled desires; instead, it suggests that fulfilment is only possible if they leave their context behind.

This seemed to me a bit of a cop-out. But I don’t mean to suggest that this is a film to be dismissed. There is plenty going on in Parched— and plenty going for it, too. Shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Russell Carpenter (of Titanic and True Lies fame) and edited by Kevin Tent (The Descendants, Nebraska, Sideways), Parched is a pacy film that puts its desert locations to picturesque use, and comes packaged with an attractive folksy score that includes the one Manganiyar song perfect for a Rajasthan-set girl-power movie: Bai-sa laad ka ghana. It’s also full of engaging actors: Surveen Chawla as the feisty but insecure stage dancer Bijli, Radhika Apte overdoing it a bit as the happy-go-lucky “baanjh” Lajo, while Tannishtha Chatterjee underplays beautifully as the widowed, lonely Rani. Leher Khan, last seen as the award-winning child star of 2013’s sincere Jalpari, is wonderfully effective as the big-eyed teenage bride Rani brings home for her son Gulab (a very persuasive Riddhi Sen), as is Chandan Anand as Bijli’s tongue-tied and hopeful assistant Raju.

Given these ingredients and its pleasure-focused feminist politics, Parched could have been that terrific thing: a Mirch Masala-plus-Manthan updated to the 21st century. But Yadav (who has previously directed the abysmal Sanjay Dutt-Aishwarya Rai starrer Shabd and an Amitabh Bachchan-Ben Kingsley thriller called Teen Patti!) seems oddly shy of the specificity that would require.

She sets her film in an unidentifiable locale, refusing to choose between Gujarat and Rajasthan, or telling us what communities the hamlet is occupied by (the plot about bride price rather than dowry suggests tribal Gujarat, but that’s just one element in the mix). Accents, too, come and go quite a bit, allowing in a strong Rajasthani inflection before suddenly switching back to Standard Hindi.

The film hands Lajo and Rani potential NGO-supported careers based on their embroidering talent, but never gives us a real glimpse of their work. Their own clothes are always seductively embroidered, without letting us place them in any community. In general, the village and its interiors feel like a rather stunning Rajasthali emporium — all mirrored earthen walls and stunning silver jewellery, with not one broken or ugly or plastic thing in sight. And the ‘fairground’ outpost, where the badass Bijli entertains all comers, seems intended to unite every kind of exportable Indian dancing body — from a seductive Bollywoodised nautanki to a dehati pole dancer, even a man in ghodi costume. The film’s most fantastic fantasy, however, is reserved for the sexual sphere: Adil Hussain’s guest appearance as the ash-smeared, free-spirited sadhu who offers soft-focus service as both impregnator-for-hire and orgasm-initiator.

All this desi exotica is clearly intended to woo a foreign film festival audience. Urban Indian movie-goers who’re irritated might want to focus instead on fun Bollywood references — like Bijli Chashmewali’s Aishwarya-like pink shades, or the shy enthusiasm with which Rani greets her own Bidi Jalai Le mobile ringtone, suggesting that she may have aged before her time, but the embers aren’t quite dead yet.

Yadav and her co-writer Supratik Sen (credited for dialogue) create warmly memorable women, whose easy equations with each other — bawdy, angry and emotional in turn — make for a happy-making female friendship film. These women aren’t perfect; I was struck in particular by Yadav’s grasp of how patriarchy is often perpetuated by women who don’t know any other way to be: Rani is the product of a society in which women are set up to remain unfulfilled by male partners and end up focusing their aspirations on their sons, keeping the unfortunate cycle in motion. Also, despite a great deal of recurring male violence against women, Yadav is keen to keep her film from feeling grim — and she mostly succeeds. There are grave missteps, though: such as the mistreated Champa, who seems intended to remind us how much worse things actually are ‘in real life’, but ends up ringing false.

Pink, the other recent Hindi film to give us both believable female friendship and political engagement with women’s sexuality, was pitched very differently, and in seeking to convert an Indian audience, gave away its punchy political messaging to a man (and the Bachchan baritone). Parched doesn’t do that, but it makes its men horrific villains, clumsy cowards, or unreal receptacles for female fantasy. But maybe Parched’s parade of men as wish-fulfilling genies, saviour princes or ogres who have to be slain should simply be seen as part of its fairy-tale mode. I just wish escape wasn’t the only solution it had to offer.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Oct 2016.

Pink isn't black or white

My Mirror column:

The film pushes the debate on sexual consent by focusing on women who don't fit into the popular idea of 'good girls'.

There's a scene early on in Pink in which a young woman called Minal Arora (the wonderful Taapsee Pannu) is on her morning jog. Headphones in her ears, she appears to be running in one of South Delhi's many 'colony' parks. As she comes to a halt, panting slightly from the exertion, she suddenly finds herself the object of someone's unwavering gaze. An oldish man sitting on a bench nearby is staring at her. She stares back at him — first warily, then with a rising tide of anger — but he remains unabashed, unflinching. It is she who must move on.

It is one of several scenes in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's film that reveals that he and his cowriters Shoojit Sircar and Ritesh Shah have grasped something that most Indian men seem quite unable to understand, even when they are ostensibly 'on your side'.

I refer to the extent to which our everyday interactions with the world seem designed to remind women that they live on sufferance. Think of the office colleague who talks to your breasts, or the co-passenger who sidles closer and closer until his hairy arm runs the entire length of yours; the service provider who demands 'extra' because your sense of vulnerability can be milked for money, or the one who insists on speaking to your male partner when you're in the middle of an argument. With every such instance from which we find ourselves forced to 'move on' comes a cumulative recognition: that our imagined freedoms are tightly circumscribed by boundaries not of our making.

It must already be apparent to you that Pink has a strong political message, and it isn't one that a popular Hindi film has ever delivered with such unexpurgated zeal or clarity. Navdeep Singh's NH10 and Pawan Kripalani's Phobia both gave us a sense of women under siege, using different generic registers of horror. In the case of Pink, the ideological content is more sledgehammer (mostly drilled into us by Amitabh Bachchan's finicky, posh-accented, bipolar lawyer Deepak Sehgal). But by splicing the sense of everyday violation together with a tense, thriller-like plot, Pink ensures that even the most uninterested viewer will not be bored.

In an astute storytelling move, the incident around which Pink's plot revolves is never given to us as a whole. Like the 'public' within the film — the nosy neighbours who come out to comment when the police appear in their mohalla, or the finger-pointing boys who refer to it as "woh Suraj Kund kaand" — we piece it together, from snatches of conversation and CCTV footage, from a melting pot of gossip and rumour, police files and court testimony.

Not only does this cinematic technique serve to keep us on our toes, it is also a sharp and subversive way to make us realise how we often arrive at conclusions about events that we have not personally witnessed — based on age-old prejudices and stereotypes about class and gender and morality, aided by the fresh daily grinding of the rumour mill.

There have been other Indian films that have dealt with the public and private aftermath of sexual assault — I think of the 1978 Ghar, in which Vinod Mehra plays the emotionally paralysed husband to Rekha's post-rape traumatised wife, or of Rituparno Ghosh's superb Dahan, in which, too, a young housewife must suffer the consequences of a sexual assault on the street during which her husband was present but unable to help her.

Unlike those films, Pink pushes the ongoing debate about sexual consent to its utmost, by focusing on women who do not fit easily into the popular idea of good girls. The three young women who form the film's tightly-knit core — Kirti Kulhari as Falak, Andrea Tariang as Andrea and Pannu as Minal — are neither innocent and virginal, nor the good wives of ostensibly good men on whose behalf a male audience might feel outraged. They are youthful, independent women who have chosen to live outside the "protection" of their families; they remain daughters and sisters, yes, but are also employees, friends and lovers. They enjoy a drink (or three), they enter freely into relationships with men they like; and they are not easy to slot as victims — because they fight back. By forcing us to contend with these characters in their flawed humanity, Pink shifts the cinematic discourse.

And yet, what are we to make of the fact that the answer to these young women's problems — even in the space of this quite remarkable film — must come from a man, and not just any man but the one who spent the first part of the film intruding so rudely into their space, played by an actor who is the film industry's undisputed patriarch? And though Bachchan's unnerving man from the park turns out to be a saviour in disguise, his 'saving' involves an unnecessarily public recounting of his client's sexual history. Surely there's something to think about there.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Sep 2016.