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

The Life Support Machine

My Mirror piece: 

Ruchika Oberoi's Island City pushes our technologised reality to its starkest logical conclusions.

No man is an island,/ Entire of itself,/ Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main," wrote the seventeenth century English poet John Donne.

Filmmaker Ruchika Oberoi's directorial debut is a thoughtful triptych of tales that suggest that we may have drifted very far from Donne's vision of humanity.

The protagonists of Oberoi's film — whether single or married, with well-defined social identities or without — are increasingly unmoored from their surroundings, and sometimes from themselves. To stay with Donne's words for a bit, each is "a clod... washed away by the sea", but the loss appears to go unnoticed. Nothing and no one is the less.

Island City's disturbing portrait of a present-day Indian city — it is Mumbai, but it could be anywhere — is made up of three segments. In the first, 'Fun Committee', an employee is sent on a forced "day off" because company research has shown that productivity is down because employees are not having enough fun. 

In 'The Ghost in the Machine', a housewife and her children find their lives much lighter in the temporary absence of the head of the family. In 'Contact', the last segment, a young woman stuck in a rut finds sudden hope when she receives a letter.

The film opens with shots of the gleaming, glassy surfaces that make up so much of the contemporary city -- the city in which we ought to see ourselves reflected, but which seems strangely opaque. We bounce off its high-gloss exteriors.

The eerie dawn silence is punctured by an alarm clock, and its faux-cheery wake-up announcement is the first of the many machines in Island City that seem to have replaced human contact. The disembodied female voice in which the company speaks to its employees on the public address announcement system; the office elevator announcing the day's temperature; even the microwave in the kitchen tinnily urging you to 'Enjoy Your Meal' seems to know that there isn't a human being around to make sure you do.

While the machines are increasingly trying to get us to believe they're human, human beings are becoming more machine-like. The corporate floor in the Fun Committee segment is a bit like an updated Metropolis: everything is neat and ordered, people file into a bus, and file out of the bus into their office, swiping their cards with exactly the same gesture.

Even the yoga stretches done by the hapless Suyash Chaturvedi (Vinay Pathak's sad-faced protagonist in the first segment) seem like they're being performed by an automaton. It is a short step from the physical enforcement of order to the naturalisation of a world in which we all do what we are told — no matter if our hearts or minds aren't in it. It is a deliberately excessive, tragicomic vision of late capitalist society — and yet Oberoi's deft handling makes sure we know when to stop laughing.

The film's second part, starring the always wonderful Amruta Subash, also places technology at its centre. Here, however, it appears in a much more recognisable, ordinary form: television.

The story's setting, too, is much less starkly atomised than that of Pathak in the first part: we have a fully-formed family unit: the husband and wife with two small children, and the husband's mother living with them.

But the existence of socially legitimised bonds, the filmmaker seems to suggest, is no guarantor that they mean something. The family that ought to be grief-stricken finds itself oddly liberated, and the television becomes the expression of their collective sigh of relief.

The mirroring between their lives and the TV serial they become obsessed with can seem heavy-handed. But Oberoi achieves something remarkable here — she shows us how powerfully we are formed by fiction, while simultaneously suggesting that we can use it to suppress what we feel in our real lives.

The last segment is perhaps the most chilling. There is more of the dirt and noise and clamour of the city here than in the previous two sections, and we might think of that as offering more human connection. But the young woman protagonist is oppressed by the crowd. Society seems to press in on her from all sides — she has no privacy in which to even read something, no friends with whom to share her unarticulated imaginings, and certainly not the security which men have to lay claim to the city.

The city here alienates with its masculinity, with the pressure it exerts on women to accept their fate — a milieu so thoughtless that it can blame women for not participating joyfully in our own everyday subjugation. The surrounding characters are perhaps less fully realised than in the second part, but Tannishtha Chatterjee is deeply believable as the ordinary girl holding out hope that she isn't as ordinary as everyone thinks; for one other human being to prove to her that she's worth something.

The anonymous letter-writer urges Aarti to believe: "Is machini duniya mein tumhari insaniyat salaamat hai [In this mechanical world, your humanity is still intact]". Island City wants to tell us quite the opposite.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Sep 2016.