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Release date:
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June 16, 2017
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Director:
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Rahul Dahiya
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Cast:
Language:
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Rajveer Singh, Neha Chauhan,
Rashmi Singh Somvanshi, Nitin Pandit, Sandeep Goyat, Parth
Sharma, Vibha Tyagi
Haryanvi, Hindi
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In a small town in Haryana, not far from where I sit writing this review,
a woman escapes home in the dead of night with her lover. Within minutes, they
are abducted by car-jackers. On the drive that follows, during which she is
almost raped, one of the men asks why she is running away. Is her husband
impotent? Does he beat her up? He runs through a list that even an
ultra-conservative might see as believable reasons (reasons, not
justifications) why a woman might choose to dump her pati parmeshwar, the deity she is legally and socially bound to for
life.
This pretty, feisty
(albeit slightly silly) creature does not fit the mould of his
imagination though. She is leaving, she says, because she does not love her
husband and he has no interest in her beyond the few minutes he spends each day
getting into her salwar.
That early
conversation in a cramped vehicle flying down a Haryana-Delhi highway comes to
mind when we later meet another free spirit in a tiny Haryana village, the
lovely Kiran who has a mind of her own, and emotions, plans, dreams and desires
no one expects her to have. Writer-director Rahul Dahiya’s heart-stoppingly
beautiful G Kutta Se (earlier called G – A Wanton Heart) is about the claustrophobic and hypocritical world that suppresses
and suffocates those like Kiran, a world where family ‘honour’ resides between
the legs of womankind.
This is a place
where women are denied dignity and men roam free, where loneliness and sexual
yearning can drive women to make foolish choices in men, where segregation
could result in dangerous innocence, where such innocence and gullibility in a
girl can become punishable, where men may vent their testosterone on unwilling
women yet demand virginity from their daughters and sisters, where women are
themselves often aggressive purveyors of patriarchy, where a disinterested
woman is more desirable than one who says yes, where a man might avenge his
unrequited lust by raising a din about the ‘chastity’ of a girl who did not
notice him and targeting the chap she did, and where death is a real and
present danger for any girl or woman who does not play by the rules.
However much the
media may have told us about what are euphemistically termed ‘honour
killings’, nothing can prepare us for the casualness with which such crimes are
committed by ordinary people in G Kutta
Se. However disturbing the film’s early scenes may be, nothing prepares us
for the frightening level of misogyny and the murders that follow.
Four stories
intersect here: they involve the runaway wife, her abductor Virender, his
little sister who gets exploited by a creepy local boy and Kiran, a college
girl who is having a clandestine affair. This is clearly a social setting
Dahiya knows well. What makes his work exceptional though is its unassuming
tone and utter sincerity. There is no “see how socially conscious I am”
attitude here that has pervaded many recent Bollywood films made by directors
who do not give a damn about women’s rights but chose to cash in on the
increasing media spotlight on feminism; there is no screeching background score
to melodramatise intrinsically dramatic scenarios; no fanfare with which
‘issues’ are raised. In G Kutta Se,
life unspools on screen as though it just happened to happen while a camera
passed by.
Far from
downplaying the seriousness of the subject at hand, Dahiya’s matter-of-fact
storytelling style and Sachin Kabir’s unobtrusive cinematography have the
effect of further underlining the blazing intensity of their theme, so that
every new development comes as a punch in the gut.
Understatement is
among the film’s greatest assets. The other is its cast of actors so natural
that they feel like real people whose true story is being told. Although an
array of smaller characters are well-written and well-rounded off, the two who
end up being protagonists of sorts are Kiran and Virender played by the good-looking Neha Chauhan
(earlier seen in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love
Sex aur Dhoka) and Rajveer Singh. Both deliver flawless performances.
“G” in the title is to be read
variously as the Hindi words for “live” (from the usage “live your life”, as
for example with “ja Simran, ja g le apni
zindagi”) or “the human will” (derived from a scene in the film where a
woman says, “jisko g karega na, usko doongi”
which amounts to “I shall fuck whoever I please”); or even the G-spot, which
epitomises the sexual pleasure forbidden to the women of this film. This is my interpretation of the
director’s notes, which I sought out after watching the film. Initially the title
struck me as inaccessible, since it does not immediately offer up its meaning,
but having heard the catchy song accompanying the closing credits (music: Anjo
John, lyrics:
Dahiya and Danish Raza), I find myself intrigued and still enjoying the challenge of
translating “G Kutta Se”. Figure out
your own take once you watch it.
It is a measure of the extent to
which the Censor Board interferes in filmmakers’ creative choices these days
that the Board had the audacity to ask for the replacement of this quote which was placed
at the start of the film, “Your borrowed ego lies rooted in the same taboo,
the same sexual desire, which gave you life, for which you cease my existence”,
with these statistics which were earlier placed at the end: “There are about
5000 honour killings reported every year in 23 countries around the world.
Official estimates state that about a 1000 persons are reported killed in India
alone. However, a large number of cases go unreported.” The figures are
appalling, no doubt, but where they are presented in the film should
have been the director’s business and his alone. The idiocy and arrogance of
the Board should be the subject of a full-length feature some day soon.
G Kutta Se runs for 103 crisply edited minutes, but feels
less. Not too long back, Navdeep Singh’s excellent NH10 had taken us into a Haryana hinterland ridden with
gender-related violence. G Kutta Se
is completely different yet just as searingly effective. It is about hypocrisy
and double standards, but the point about it is not that it merely picks a
relevant topic. The point is that it does a great job of telling a solid story
based on that relevant topic.
There are several
bloody moments in G Kutta Se (none of
them gratuitous), but the scene that shook me to the core had no gore. It
features a young woman arranging a rendezvous with her male lover. When they
meet, all he wants is to have sex, and he is taken aback when she refuses,
assuming perhaps at first that she is playing hard to get – I confess, at
first, I wondered if the filmmaker was making a crowd-pleasing concession here,
to go along with the prevalent “she asked for it” response to sexual assault.
The young man finally snaps: If you did not want this, why on earth did you
come here? I just wanted to meet, she replies tearily.
The fact that he (a
comparatively decent chap, considering the dismal scenario) had not even
considered that possibility; that for him a relationship with a woman is not
about conversations and friendship but about sex alone is
scary and deeply saddening to say the least.
Far beyond its
shock value, it is scenes like this – unexpected, acutely observant and written
with moving sensitivity – that make G
Kutta Se such a special film.
Rating
(out of five stars): ****
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CBFC Rating (India):
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A
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Running time:
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103 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: Rahul Dahiya
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