The dance of anger

My Mirror column:

Ivan Ayr’s film about a Delhi policewoman, now streaming on Netflix, is an astute study of female power and powerlessness.

The members of any oppressed class have two options on the world stage. They can fill the roles they're given, thrill to the indulgent applause that comes their way -- and accept that they will never direct the show. Or they can demand the bigger, better parts, try to change the script -- and risk finding themselves thrown out of the production.

When a system is stacked heavily against you, there are many advantages to be gained from not upsetting the apple cart. Given a bit of power within such a system, most people would play safe. But Soni isn't most people.

At one level, Ivan Ayr's first feature is a finely observed study of what it might feel like to be an ordinary young woman in present-day Delhi — in the streets, at home, in school, at work. But at another level, Ayr's eponymous protagonist is clearly not an ordinary young woman: because she works with the police. Co-written with Kislay (whose short fiction Hamare Ghar was mercilessly astute about our behaviour as middle class employers of domestic help), the film plays constantly on the gap between what Soni appears to be and what she actually is. It begins with Geetika Vidya Ohlyan's physical presence, her body language. When we see the petite figure on the bicycle, cycling as fast as possible through a dark alley, her lips pursed into silence even as her harasser grows increasingly vocal, we imagine the worst. We are primed to imagine a woman on Delhi's streets as a victim. So there is a sense of shock – and perhaps embarrassment – when we realize she isn't one.

And yet, that is by no means the end-point where the film wishes to deposit us. Because what becomes eminently clear is that Soni's unusual position of power – bolstered by her physical training, her job as a law enforcement official, even just her status as a financially independent working woman – does not in fact exempt her from the anxieties of ordinary women. That is true just as much within her closest private relationships – in the heartbreaking sense of feeling abandoned by the man she might have loved – as it is with men in public places. Even the women handling police control hotline are not immune to the unwanted attentions of men.

Ayr and his cinematographer David Bolen do a brilliant job of showing us how a woman walking alone on the Indian street might experience it as an obstacle course, a video game filled with potential dangers. The roads half-blocked by Metro construction, the lack of any pavements to speak of, the rickshaw that drives too close to you, the men huddled around bonfires at street corners, their casually delivered 'behen ke lodey's audible as you approach – these everyday sights and sounds of a Delhi winter night are both perfectly ordinary and possible sources of assault.

The scenes with Soni working as a police decoy have an indescribable intensity. As Soni walks tensely through the streets, her face drained of colour even in the glow of Lohri fires, one feels as if the city turns each woman in it into a decoy, each walk we take is an experiment upon the self. If even pretending to be a victim can be so draining, the filmmakers seem to suggest, can you imagine what it's like to actually be one?

And yet this is not some hopeless, helpless film. One of my favourite moments is when Soni gets out of the police car to get the special chai that the tea stall guy will only make if he knows it's for her. That individual relationship with the city, that claim upon it, is one women deserve to be able to make as much as men – and some day perhaps we won't need to remark upon it.

Soni is also a twin character study, contrasting the hotheadedness of its eponymous heroine against the quieter foil of her boss Kalpana (Saloni Batra). Though also a woman in a male-dominated force, Kalpana has arrived there via a very different route: the Indian civil services examination. That more bookish route is gestured to in Kalpana's rule-bound decision-making; in her attempts to make her subordinates follow the letter of the law – automatically file an FIR when a woman complains of harassment, or call in a woman officer to help question a clearly petrified girl who may or may not have been raped. There is also, of course, a class difference between Soni and Kalpana which might have some impact on their differential levels of self-control, though the film is never so crude as to spell that out.

But what is so fertile about their relationship is that each appreciates the other's characteristics. As the senior officer, Kalpana is constantly having to answer for Soni's outbreaks of uncontrollable anger. But her chastising of Soni seems always to come from a space of understanding. It is as if a part of her would be glad to punch those men herself. Violence isn't the answer, but sometimes it makes the questions visible.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Mar 2019.