Release date:
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July 7, 2017
|
Director:
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Ravi Udyawar
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Cast:
Language:
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Sridevi, Sajal
Ali, Adnan Siddiqui, Akshaye Khanna, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Abhimanyu Singh,
Vikas Verma, Adarsh Gourav Bhagvatula, Pitobash Tripathy
Hindi
|
How could you get
the politics of your film almost perfect in the first half, then descend into
eternal Bollywood clichés about rape and maaaaaaa
in the second? How could you go from low-key to high-pitched within the span of
a single narrative? How could you assemble some of the most talented screen
performers ever seen together in a film, then limit many of them with
one-dimensional characterisation?
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
Debutant director
Ravi Udyawar’s Mom revolves around a
mother whose teenaged daughter is sexually assaulted in the most gruesome
fashion imaginable.
Sridevi plays the
central character, Devki Sabarwal. She is not your typical
old-time-Bollywood Nirupa Roy kind of perennially weeping madre who was restricted to keeping house, longing for a bahu and shouting at God for being a patthar ki murti unmoved by her adoring
son’s hardships. Devki is a senior school biology teacher, and is struggling to
gain the affections of her husband’s first child Arya. Her mild demeanour
camouflages a tough-as-nails personality though. That hidden Durga goes on a rampage
– quiet at first – when Arya’s torn and ravaged
body is found one day in a ditch, and the girl is let down by the judiciary.
You probably know
this much already if you have been following the film’s publicity and have read
its Wikipedia page. What you do not know yet is that the pre-interval portion
of Mom goes beyond the expected, the initial treatment
of the mother-daughter relationship is unconventional, and the long-drawn-out
scene of gangrape is chilling yet sensitively done – what unfolds before our eyes is designed to
horrify, yet we are not shown a single shot of what
actually happens to Arya, which is a relief considering how Bollywood of an
earlier era often used rape to titillate audiences rather than evoke empathy
for the abused.
In the opening half
of Mom, I found myself sobbing
uncontrollably and moved to the point of speechlessness. I remember quickly
pretending to check my phone during the interval for fear that a colleague at
the press preview might strike up a conversation with me and realise I had lost
my voice.
Understatement is
the hallmark of Mom up to this point,
and the gender politics is just so. But for a passing comment by Devki, which
is atypical of this seemingly liberal woman, the writing does not stereotype women or sexual violence until then.
(Credits: story by Ravi Udyawar, Girish Kohli and Kona Venkat,
screenplay and dialogue by Girish Kohli.)
Perhaps that
comment should have given us a hint of what was to come though. When Devki goes
to a police station to report a missing daughter, cops brush aside her fear,
with one going to the extent of saying that the girl has most likely taken off
with her boyfriend since it is Valentine’s night. You may have come across many
such girls but my daughter is not that type, Devki retorts. That type?
Really?
If those words had
come from a character who had already been established as a conservative by the
screenplay, it would have made sense, but since Devki is portrayed as an
open-minded person, this sounded more like the writers unwittingly betraying
their inner conservatism.
Still, that remark
was overshadowed by the poignance of the film up to that moment.
Sadly, the
post-interval portion of Mom leaves
behind normal human beings with normal reactions to crimes against themselves
and their loved ones, and gives way to cinematic clichés. Devki becomes an
avenging angel in the mould of Dimple Kapadia in 1988’s Zakhmi Aurat, and Mom
begins its downhill slide.
This is why last
year’s Pink was so unusual – because
for the most part, it showed us how ordinary people react to sexual violence in
particular and injustices in general, despite the frustrations of inhabiting an unjust
world.
Revenge sprees are less challenging to write though than nuanced normality. They also serve to
satisfy the bloodlust of the audience, which is why commercial cinema has opted
for them so often down the decades. If it was not a zakhmi aurat (wounded woman) it was a brother out to avenge the
loss of his ghar ki izzat (family
honour). In A Wednesday (2008),
director Neeraj Pandey extended this populism to mob
justice in terror cases, with a Common Man taking the law into his own hands to
punish aatankvaadis who he feels are
being needlessly given fair trials in the Indian system. In Mom the argument is articulated thus: “Galat aur bahut galat mein se chun-na ho toh
aap kya chunenge?” (If you have to choose between what is wrong and what is
very wrong, what would you choose?)
To be fair to
Bollywood, it is not the only Indian film industry guilty of this charge. The Malayalam film industry
a.k.a. Mollywood, for instance, has in recent years
given us Puthiya Niyamam (2016) and 22 Female Kottayam (2012), which too
were crowd-pleasing portrayals of rape.
Even for those who
do not care about realism and reality, Mom
is problematic for its lazy writing in the second half where loose ends are
left hanging so openly that an intelligent person might spot them from a mile
away. A criminal leaves behind a mega clue at a crime scene, but casually outwits
a supposedly smart cop who gets
his hands on it and who, at that
point, is not sympathetic to her cause, which means he cannot be assumed to
have deliberately let it go. Two people who show
considerable deftness in committing three crimes, suddenly become really stupid with their fourth
potential victim. And those same accomplices
vow to hide their association from the world, yet subsequently
provide elephant-sized evidence of it to the police.
So yes, Sridevi’s
acting is wonderful; the actors playing her supportive husband Anand (Adnan
Siddiqui) and Arya (Sajal Ali) have immensely likeable personalities; the use of A.R. Rahman’s music in the first half is
effective; the always amazing Anay Goswami’s cinematography summons up
stunning grandeur and intimacy by turns, depending on the requirement of the
situation; and a particular mention must be made of
the brilliant sound design by Nihar Ranjan Samal during the assault on Arya; but
none of that can compensate for the post-interval increase in the film’s
volume, the limited use of a talented actor like Akshaye Khanna (as the
policeman Mathew Francis), the over-use of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s histrionics
for the character of the detective Dayashankar Kapoor a.k.a. DK, the re-stressing of gender stereotypes through a transgender character in
the film, the loopholes and, above all, the cliched portrayal of the response
to sexual assault.
As if all this is
not bad enough, Mom’s handling of the
judicial process too lacks clarity and is misleading to viewers who do not know
the nitty-gritty of India’s laws governing rape. I hope a lawyer will review
this film in the coming days.
Ultimately then, despite its
pretensions to non-conformism, Mom does
nothing more than aim at easy applause. That
goal is best illustrated by its predictable,
horribly maudlin ending about maaaaaaaaaa.
Perhaps it was
foolish to expect anything better from a film in which one character says, “Bhagwan har jagah nahin hota, DKji (God
is not everywhere),” to which DKji a.k.a. Dayashankar Kapoor replies,
“Isiliye toh usne maa banaayi hai (yes,
that is why he made mothers).” If you want
to be Manmohan Desai or Yash Chopra, why not go all out and not pretend?
The emotional pull
of the first half and Sridevi’s acting excellence notwithstanding, Mom in many ways is as dangerous as the
loud, raucous, not-even-pretending-to-be-progressive-about-women commercial
Bollywood of the 1970s and ’80s.
Rating
(out of five stars): **1/4
CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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147 minutes 43 seconds
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
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