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Release
date:
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February 28, 2020
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Director:
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Anubhav Sinha
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Cast:
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Taapsee Pannu, Pavail Gulati, Dia Mirza, Maya Sarao, Kumud Mishra,
Ratna Pathak Shah, Tanvi Azmi, Geetika Vidya, Ram Kapoor, Manav Kaul, Naila
Grewal, Ankur Rathee, Santanu Ghatak
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Language:
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Hindi
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“This is life, after all.”
“Take
it in your stride.”
“This
is a woman’s fate.”
“You have made your point, now drop it.”
Women
who object to violence from their husbands get to hear these lines repeatedly,
even when the man is a serial offender. If the protest is against infrequent physical abuse or a solitary episode, the volume of these degrading
clichés rises manifold. In Thappad,
Taapsee Pannu’s character elicits
variations of these responses from almost everyone around her. What makes this
film what it is is the protagonist’s – and the writers’ – unwavering conviction
that in the matter of spousal assault, once is once too many.
Writer-director
Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad (Slap), which
he co-wrote with Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul, features Pannu as a stay-at-home wife whose feelings for her
husband turn from devotion to indifference when he strikes her one day. They
have been a traditional couple until then. He has a busy career, she makes his
dreams her own. While he labours over office assignments, she labours over his
every need, serving him meals, chasing him up to the car with his wallet and a
beverage while feeding him his unfinished breakfast, caring for his elderly
mother, maintaining the house, entertaining
guests.
They seem to be happy. So when she switches off after a single slap,
most people cannot understand. As he himself puts it, “Shit happens. It
happens. People move on.”
Thappad is
not a saga of multiple twists and turns, unlike Sinha’s earlier two politically
charged films, Mulk and Article 15. This one has just one big
twist – that slap – which is already in the trailer, but what follows is
a heroine’s dramatic inner journey and a gripping chronicle of how it
impacts and/or exposes every single person in her life.
Pannu submits herself fully to the role of Amrita a.k.a. Amu. She is so
immersed in her character that I almost failed to notice how exquisite she
looks in the film – there is that too. She makes Amu’s smooth transition from
smiling self-subordination within a marriage to shock to self-awareness completely believable.
The
wonderful Ratna Pathak Shah as Amu’s conflicted mother who evolves during the
course of the story, Kumud Mishra as her evolved yet evolving father and Tanvi
Azmi as her silently suffering saas
form the backbone of Thappad’s large and talented supporting
cast. Geetika Vidya shows up as a housemaid who refuses to allow her
miserable domestic life to dull her sunny disposition, and is as convincing
here as she was playing a combustible policewoman in the acclaimed
Netflix original Soni. Ankur Rathee as Amu’s brother
is the only weak link in the chain.
The pleasant surprise of the cast for me was Dia Mirza. For years I have
noticed her solely for her delicate looks, but director Sinha manages to tap
the artiste in her in a way others have not. She makes Amu’s supportive
neighbour special and sweet.
As the problematic husband Vikram, Pavail Gulati has perhaps the
trickiest job in Thappad since he has
to convey arrogance yet also help us understand why Amu might have loved him
yet not command empathy. He is a guy who is kind to the household help, but
thinks nothing of ordering his wife around like a junior at work. He does not
have horns on his head, he is just another entitled jerk who is blinded by his
male privilege. A fine actor, Gulati is up to the task.
Thappad
beautifully spotlights various shades of men, from the haughty hero to another
far more likeable person who is astonished to discover that he – like so many
men around us – is a feminist for his daughter but unconsciously patriarchal
with his wife.
The
script particularly shines in the characterisation of Vikram. Instead of lazily demonising him, Sinha and Waikul write him as
precisely the sort of chap about whom family and onlookers tend to say
indulgently in real life, “C’mon, he’s not such
a bad guy. People make mistakes. Shit happens.”
Thappad,
unlike its many characters, makes no excuses for its leading man. It stands out
not merely for taking a stand against domestic violence,
but because of its call for zero tolerance. And while the audience
may expend energy on wondering whether Vikram will apologise for his actions,
the screenplay does not make that Amu’s priority: because the assault
startles her out of a stupor after which, far from being bothered about how he
will now behave, she is off on an inner journey all her own.
For all this and more, Thappad
is a potent and engrossing film.
It does stumble occasionally though. The background score, for one,
needed toning down in the first half. Amu’s lawyer (Maya Sarao) has a relationship
with a man that feels somewhat contrived
for coolth.
The narrative could have also done without
giving each primary character a redeeming moment in the end – not everyone
grows, let us accept that. The final exchange between Amrita’s brother and
his girlfriend felt more than a little stretched, and the possibility the
ending holds out for Vikram made me uncomfortable.
These are lesser issues than the manner in which Thappad’s dialogues pointedly blame
mothers for the way daughters are conditioned to accept mistreatment from spouses
and deprioritise themselves, with a mention of a father almost as an
afterthought. Brief though this is, it is a surprisingly conservative
stand from an otherwise liberal film. Of course women are often enablers of
patriarchy, but it is one thing to state that – as Thappad does so well throughout – and quite another to have
characters playing along with prevalent notions about maternal-versus-paternal
responsibility, thus consciously playing down the accountability
of the actual beneficiaries of patriarchy: men.
Whether to play to the gallery or due to a limited understanding of why
financial settlements are granted to wives upon divorce, Thappad gets simplistic in a debate on this matter in the film. The
least that Sinha and Waikul could have done was address the point that, among other things,
such settlements are an acknowledgement of the unpaid work women do in
home management, child rearing and elder care, leaving men free to earn.
These are incongruities in a film that otherwise marks an important
moment in the history of Hindi cinema.
Thappad is
earnest and succeeds in being engaging throughout, despite its challenging
theme. Its awareness of gender goes beyond the obvious. It is significant, for
instance, that the leading lady whose stance on intimate partner violence
ends up educating and inspiring others is a stay-at-home wife and not a
high-profile professional, thus reminding us that both conformism and rebellion
could come from any quarters. It is significant too that she is placed in an
educated, well-off family in a city rather than a poor or illiterate household
in rural India, which would have allowed sections of the audience to pat itself
on the back and pretend that such things do not happen among “people like us”.
Precisely because of its chosen setting, Thappad is designed to make us uncomfortable about our milieu and
compel us to introspect about our own complicity in patriarchy. It also shines
a light on patriarchy and gender-based violence across class
divides.
Sinha and Waikul’s contemplative writing is exemplified by the tangential
points they make without seeming to make them at all. Such as the recognition
of a fact rarely recognised by a society obsessed with marriage and coupledom:
that it is okay to be on your own. Or, at a time when Islamophobia and
community representation are top of the mind for liberal Bollywood
watchers, the casual presence of an important Christian character –
a good person at that – in a film from an industry that has virtually erased
the community from its stories for decades, once it dispensed with the stereotype
of Christians as Westernised, quasi-alien drunkards, gangsters and sexually
promiscuous gangsters’ molls.
And my
goodness, the way that slap is presented! Like a bucket of ice being
hurled on a sleeping human, or thunder that could end any reverie. Very
much like the film itself.
Rating (out
of 5 stars): 3.5
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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142 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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