My Mirror column:
A promising film about sex workers strives to be bleakly documentary while also taking the revolutionary road — and loses its way.
Aditya Kripalani’s filmTikli and Laxmi Bomb , currently streaming on Netflix, has many promising things about it. Based on Kripalani’s own 2015 book, the plot revolves around a group of Mumbai-based sex workers who come together to carry out what they call a ‘revolution against men’ — not by stopping the work they do, but by eliminating the middlemen who control their business.
Just by giving centre stage to a group of sex workers, Kripalani turns away from the long-standing cinematic tradition in which the prostitute/ tawaif/ dancing girl could really only be one of two things: a heartless two-timing vamp, or the golden-hearted receptacle of the hero’s pity and desire. Other than Shyam Benegal’s still unsurpassed Mandi, in which the occupants of a brothel find ways of dealing with the ire of ‘respectable’ society, even Hindi cinema’s non-titillating attempts to give the sex worker a voice have never been able to do without a ‘good guy’, a hero through whose eyes we might view these women sympathetically.
Whether it be Guru Dutt’s idealistic poet ‘accepting’ Waheeda Rehman’s Gulab in Pyaasa, Chandramukhi in all the versions of Devdas, or Rekha in Umrao Jaan, all the way down to Rahul Bose’s encounter with the streetwalker Kareena Kapoor in Chameli and Aamir Khan’s police inspector Shekhawat falling for Rosie (Kareena again) in Talaash, the sex worker has been a figure of romantic fantasy. Her existence on the Hindi film screen has remained about being fascinating to men — if not sexually, then as an object of curiosity.
So it is valuable that Kripalani makes the film’s pivotal relationship one between two women. Putul AKA Tikli (Chitrangada Chakraborty) is young and new to Mumbai’s streets, showing up on the scene with enough spark to reignite the fortyish Laxmi’s (Vibhavari Deshpande) fading hopes. Some of the ways in which the contrast between them is gestured to are perhaps too obvious, like Putul’s high heels, tight jeans and glamorously open hair versus Laxmi’s unchangingly loose, dark-coloured collared shirts at work and aunty-style nighties to sleep in. But both actresses are wonderful, bringing to life both the initial friction between the jaded, no-nonsense Laxmi and the fun-loving, talkative Tikli and their gradual path to friendship.
The fact that Kripalani’s film does not adopt a male point of view is reinforced by having women in many of the technical positions: art direction, cinematography, assistant direction, costume design and editing. It presents these women as sexual beings when they present themselves that way — when Tikli sashays down a hotel corridor, or when Shari lehraos a sari aanchal. When and if the camera dehumanises a woman, it is done very obviously through the eyes of a leering man.
“Andhera apna dost hai,” Laxmi tells Tikli early on, and the film is indeed shot in various degrees of darkness — in alleys, parks, seedy bars, even seedier living rooms and the interiors of cars — punctuated occasionally by neon lighting, as in AT’s auto which ferries the women to work. Something about Laxmi’s harshly tube-lit cubby hole of a room, with almost no furniture and a fading Prabhat Studio poster on the roughly plastered wall, reminded me of the rented rooms in which the dancers lived in Mira Nair’s affecting 1985 documentary India Cabaret.
The bareness of the locations and the handheld, almost jerky, camerawork underline the bareness and rootlessness of these lives. And the style does work, to the extent that the film shows us sex work as the unglamorous drudgery — the work — that it is. It also allows us to move from watching these women treat the police station casually, as a place they’re so used to that they can sit around after a ‘raid’ boredly taking selfies, to being suddenly jolted into the exploitative violence of this ‘workplace’. The normalisation of sex work as labour is matched by the normalisation of its potential violence.
But there is a strange disjuncture between this documentary realism and the heroic, almost epic narrative of the war that the ‘Tikli and Laxmi Gang’ sets out to wage against patriarchy. That melodramatic, almost filmi register appears particularly in the characterisation of Putul and Laxmi: in their tragic backstories, their action sequences, their grandiose plans. There is aRang de Basanti reference in the dialogue that makes a wink-wink acknowledgement of this aspect, but the film remains tonally disjointed.
The very first scene had shown us Laxmi (Deshpande) waking up to find that the wrist she’d tried to slit at night has only bled painfully, without resulting in her death. “Failure even at suicide,” she mutters in disgust, placing the scene somewhere between tragedy and farce. Sadly, the film never quite figures out which it wants to be.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Sep 2018.
A promising film about sex workers strives to be bleakly documentary while also taking the revolutionary road — and loses its way.
Aditya Kripalani’s film
Just by giving centre stage to a group of sex workers, Kripalani turns away from the long-standing cinematic tradition in which the prostitute/ tawaif/ dancing girl could really only be one of two things: a heartless two-timing vamp, or the golden-hearted receptacle of the hero’s pity and desire. Other than Shyam Benegal’s still unsurpassed Mandi, in which the occupants of a brothel find ways of dealing with the ire of ‘respectable’ society, even Hindi cinema’s non-titillating attempts to give the sex worker a voice have never been able to do without a ‘good guy’, a hero through whose eyes we might view these women sympathetically.
Whether it be Guru Dutt’s idealistic poet ‘accepting’ Waheeda Rehman’s Gulab in Pyaasa, Chandramukhi in all the versions of Devdas, or Rekha in Umrao Jaan, all the way down to Rahul Bose’s encounter with the streetwalker Kareena Kapoor in Chameli and Aamir Khan’s police inspector Shekhawat falling for Rosie (Kareena again) in Talaash, the sex worker has been a figure of romantic fantasy. Her existence on the Hindi film screen has remained about being fascinating to men — if not sexually, then as an object of curiosity.
So it is valuable that Kripalani makes the film’s pivotal relationship one between two women. Putul AKA Tikli (Chitrangada Chakraborty) is young and new to Mumbai’s streets, showing up on the scene with enough spark to reignite the fortyish Laxmi’s (Vibhavari Deshpande) fading hopes. Some of the ways in which the contrast between them is gestured to are perhaps too obvious, like Putul’s high heels, tight jeans and glamorously open hair versus Laxmi’s unchangingly loose, dark-coloured collared shirts at work and aunty-style nighties to sleep in. But both actresses are wonderful, bringing to life both the initial friction between the jaded, no-nonsense Laxmi and the fun-loving, talkative Tikli and their gradual path to friendship.
The fact that Kripalani’s film does not adopt a male point of view is reinforced by having women in many of the technical positions: art direction, cinematography, assistant direction, costume design and editing. It presents these women as sexual beings when they present themselves that way — when Tikli sashays down a hotel corridor, or when Shari lehraos a sari aanchal. When and if the camera dehumanises a woman, it is done very obviously through the eyes of a leering man.
“Andhera apna dost hai,” Laxmi tells Tikli early on, and the film is indeed shot in various degrees of darkness — in alleys, parks, seedy bars, even seedier living rooms and the interiors of cars — punctuated occasionally by neon lighting, as in AT’s auto which ferries the women to work. Something about Laxmi’s harshly tube-lit cubby hole of a room, with almost no furniture and a fading Prabhat Studio poster on the roughly plastered wall, reminded me of the rented rooms in which the dancers lived in Mira Nair’s affecting 1985 documentary India Cabaret.
The bareness of the locations and the handheld, almost jerky, camerawork underline the bareness and rootlessness of these lives. And the style does work, to the extent that the film shows us sex work as the unglamorous drudgery — the work — that it is. It also allows us to move from watching these women treat the police station casually, as a place they’re so used to that they can sit around after a ‘raid’ boredly taking selfies, to being suddenly jolted into the exploitative violence of this ‘workplace’. The normalisation of sex work as labour is matched by the normalisation of its potential violence.
But there is a strange disjuncture between this documentary realism and the heroic, almost epic narrative of the war that the ‘Tikli and Laxmi Gang’ sets out to wage against patriarchy. That melodramatic, almost filmi register appears particularly in the characterisation of Putul and Laxmi: in their tragic backstories, their action sequences, their grandiose plans. There is a
The very first scene had shown us Laxmi (Deshpande) waking up to find that the wrist she’d tried to slit at night has only bled painfully, without resulting in her death. “Failure even at suicide,” she mutters in disgust, placing the scene somewhere between tragedy and farce. Sadly, the film never quite figures out which it wants to be.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Sep 2018.
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