REVIEW 569: PADMAN

Release date:	February 9, 2018
Director:	R. Balki
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Radhika Apte, Sonam Kapoor    Hindi

Akshay Kumar is charming.

Arunachalam Muruganantham redefines the word fascinating.

Separately, Kumar’s charisma and Muruganantham’s saga are remarkable ingredients for any film. Together though, they are Padman’s failing and its strength.

Muruganantham’s life has been widely chronicled by journalists and was the subject of the excellent documentary Menstrual Man by Amit Virmani released in 2012. A poor school dropout from Tamil Nadu, Muruganantham invented a low-cost production system for sanitary napkins when he saw his wife using dirty, unhygienic home-made cloth pads during her periods. His methods, media reports tell us, have now become both a source of inexpensive, clean sanitary pads and income for rural women across most Indian states as he spearheads a movement to install these hand-operated machines in villages where they are run by women entrepreneurs.

The journey to this place has come at great personal cost. At first, shocked that a man would concern himself with menstruation – a subject that remains taboo in many communities in India – he was boycotted by locals and even his family who deemed him a pervert. Today, of course, he is an award-winning innovator of global repute who has earned the respect of his people and his parivaar.

In writer-director R. Balki’s hands, Muruganantham has become Lakshmikant Chauhan, a poor man from Madhya Pradesh who notices his bride using filthy rags in place of pads, is shocked at the high cost of sanitary pads available in the market and thus sets off on the same road taken by our real-life hero.

If you view Padman in a vacuum bereft of context, it is entertaining and, for the most part, sensible. How do you do that though after Muruganantham has acquired such fame, unless you have been sleeping under a rock?

Knowing that this is the biopic of a real person who has been changed from Tamilian to north Indian in the script so that a north Indian megastar could play the part makes Padman an example of so much that is wrong with north Indian cinema and our society as a whole. The north-Indian-isation of a southerner is becoming somewhat of a routine practice in Bollywood – and Kumar its foremost practitioner. The heroics of a Malayali man called Mathunny Matthews and others in the Middle East were turned into the tale of a fictional Punjabi called Ranjit Katiyal (again played by Kumar) for Airlift in 2016. Late last year, the experiences of a group of Malayali nurses who escaped captivity in Iraq after their hospital was taken over by ISIS (recounted so beautifully in the Mollywood film Take Off) was rewritten as an account of a swashbuckling fictional espionage agent called Avinash Singh Rathore (Salman Khan) rescuing them in the Bollywood film Tiger Zinda Hai.

The message from Bollywood is clear: the definitive, normative Indian is a northerner, Hindu, upper caste and male, while the rest of us are exceptions.

The difference between Airlift and Padman is that Matthews was little known outside Kerala, and therefore it was possible to place him on the backburner of the mind while watching the film. The difference between Tiger Zinda Hai and Padman is that Tiger positioned itself as over-the-top commercial fare that is not to be taken seriously, whereas Padman’s narrative style is such that it asks to be taken seriously.

This is, of course, heartbreaking, because barring this troubling truth, Balki tells his story with efficiency and, by and large, with sensitivity. It is wonderful to see a mainstream film pulling menstruation out of the realm of whispers. Besides, Kumar is a delight to watch, never more so than when he absolutely kills a speech delivered by Chauhan at the United Nations. He has an irresistible screen presence, Radhika Apte is flawless playing his wife, and the packaging – pleasant music, Kausar Munir’s breezy lyrics that resonate with meaning – makes the first half in particular completely engrossing.

(Spoilers in this paragraph) By the second half, Padman stumbles. One reason is the insertion of a character called Pari Walia as an MBA student who decides to help Chauhan/Muruganantham in his business. Sonam Kapoor is sweet as the fictional Ms Walia until the silly contrivance of a romance between her and the hero, which is hurriedly forced into the narrative. This terribly unconvincing angle sullies their segment because the writing does not convey a progression of emotions up to the point where she expresses her feelings for him. This is possibly the reason for the zero chemistry between the two stars (it does not help that Kapoor looks young enough to be Kumar’s daughter here). (Spoiler alert ends)

It is here too that Padman’s conflicted gender politics surfaces along with its limited understanding of the taboo around menstruation. Balki and his co-writer Swanand Kirkire seem to assume that two characters of the opposite sex played by two glamorous stars cannot possibly be just friends.

Besides, the early part of the film went into not just the need for affordable sanitary napkins in Chauhan/Muruganantham’s town, but another crucial issue: the social assumption that a menstruating woman is inauspicious and polluted, which is why women in so many communities are forced to stay out of the house, away from family and society, on those days of the month. By the end of Padman, the availability of sanitary napkins miraculously and without explanation leads to the end of the stigma too. This is a simplistic supposition, disappointing considering how well the subject of menstruation is dealt with in the first half.

For a film that is about self-sustenance among women, there is also some needless patriarchal dialoguebaazi about a mard being one who can provide raksha (protection) to the women in his life.

That said, there is so much in Padman that is enjoyable and meaningful. Muruganantham’s bio is so incredible that if you did not know his is a true story you might have refused to believe it. Kumar and Apte deliver engaging performances. And Balki says what he has to say with a light touch and in a non-preachy tone.

While watching Padman I tried my best to get over my exasperation at the Chauhanisation of Muruganantham. It was hard. Balki has said in an interview that his purpose was to take a message to a larger audience that Hindi cinema affords (especially since the Hindi belt is worse off in the matter of menstrual hygiene than the rest of India, that casting Kumar was part of this effort, that in any case he could not envision anyone but Kumar in the role and that it would have been unnatural to set a Hindi film in Tamil Nadu. Hmm, I wonder how we would have felt if Richard Attenborough had decided that it would be unnatural to set an English film in India, had rewritten Mahatma Gandhi as a white Briton leading India to freedom and had cast a famous white actor in the role, all with the claim that he wanted to spread the message of ahimsa far and wide. Same thing, no?

There is a lot I liked about Padman, but a lot that bothered me about it too.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	139 minutes 59 seconds

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/padman-movie-review-akshay-kumar-is-charming-in-an-entertaining-but-problematic-film-4342921.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pad_Man_(film)

REVIEW 380: KI AND KA

Release date:	April 1, 2016
Director:	R. Balki
Cast: Language:	Kareena Kapoor Khan, Arjun Kapoor, Swaroop Sampat, Rajit Kapur, Cameos: Amitabh & Jaya Bachchan Hindi

What would happen if a couple reversed socially accepted roles within their marriage? Would their relationship survive societal opprobrium, ridicule and personal insecurities if he were to be a stay-at-home spouse and she the breadwinner?

These questions that form the starting point of Ki & Ka are no doubt intriguing. They are ever relevant too, in a world that upholds stereotypical gender roles within households, with horribly regressive expressions such as “she wears the pants”. India has its own backward vocabulary, like that pejorative term for a man who has the courage to cock a snook at convention and live in his in-laws’ home: ghar jamai.  

The latter phrase comes up in Ki & Ka starring Kareena Kapoor Khan as Kia, an ambitious and successful young marketing pro who feels marriage is designed to destroy women’s careers by placing the onus of household management on the wife. When she meets Kabir (Arjun Kapoor), whose sole goal in life is to run a house (or be the “artist” his mother was, as he puts it), it is a perfect fit.

They fall in love. They marry. He cooks, cleans and supports her from home. She becomes a VP in her company and supports him financially. Cracks appear. Tensions arise. They fight. They make up. They move on.

The plot is not unconvincing. After all, unspoken power equations in most homes are governed by who earns money and who does not. Many of the individual episodes in the film are independently believable in the way they deal with the rarely explored, tricky territory Kia and Kabir are treading.

It is imaginable, for instance, that Kia would initially be embarrassed to tell her colleagues that Kabir is a househusband. Many modern-day stay-at-home wives struggle with the perennial question, “What do you do?” Similarly, it might indeed be awkward to handle “what does your husband do?” when he does not do what is socially expected of him.

There is plenty of humour too in the film, especially in the first half.

Where Ki & Ka suffers is in the narrative’s failure to weave each of these passages smoothly together. The result is a patchy, episodic feel.

Something like this. (Spoiler alert!) Episode 1: boy explains notion of their proposed relationship to girl (ergo, to audience) and establishes his liberalism. Episode 2: boy and girl meet each others’ parent/s. Episode 3: boy establishes his prowess in running house. Episode 4: boy is seen in scenarios usually populated by women in films and real life, such as kitty parties and afternoon shopping sprees. Episode 5: financial scare. Episode 6: pregnancy scare. Episode 7: fissures. And so on.

The film is so taken in by its concept that it rarely rises above it to become a fully fleshed out story about fully fleshed out people. This is in keeping with adman-turned-writer-director R. Balki’s body of work so far. He is a concepts man.

After the success of his first film Cheeni Kum, a smartly done older-man-younger-woman romance, Balki has been favouring concepts and gimmicks over stories and soul. His second film originated when he was struck by the thought of casting Amitabh Bachchan as the screen son of a character played by his real-life son. The outcome was an awkwardly executed Paa in which Bachchan Senior was a child with progeria, a rare genetic condition with symptoms resembling aspects of ageing, while Abhishek Bachchan played his Dad. Shamitabh followed, in which the Big B starred as a down-and-out actor lending his voice – yes, that famous baritone – to a mute acting aspirant (Dhanush). It was a tiresome testament to Balki’s Bachchan fanhood which, by the way, he has brought to this film too. The latest concept he has latched on to is gender role reversals.

It is unfortunate that a film taking a progressive position on man-woman relations should resort to clichés to elicit laughs, possibly to soften the blow to members of the audience who might be uncomfortable at the sight of a mainstream male star playing a stay-at-home husband. There can be no other explanation for visual imagery like Kabir wearing a mangalsutra on his wrist or Kabir in red high-heeled shoes in the closing song, High heels te nachche. What is that if not another version of the “she wears the pants” triteness?

Besides, to emphasise a point, Ki & Ka also sporadically gets characters to do and say things that are completely out of character. For instance, Kabir’s father’s aggressive, unkind reaction to their announcement of marriage is credibly handled, but Kia’s mother’s initial comments seem contrived. She asks him if he is a freeloader, a query that seems solely planted in the script to give Kabir an opportunity to ask her if she would have asked the same question to a prospective bride of a hypothetical son if the girl had expressed a desire to be a stay-at-home wife. I’m not saying a potential mother-in-law would not behave in this fashion. Point is, this conversation is inconsistent with this particular potential mother-in-law’s characterisation since she later turns out to be a genuine, out-and-out liberal, possibly more so than Kia.

Also, who are these Indian parents who seem to appear only in Hindi films to ask their daughters and future sons-in-law to their faces whether they have had sex because it’s “important before commitment”? It is as if the filmmaker is screaming into our faces: Look, look, see how cool I’ve made this Mommy! But wait, she’s a social worker. Phir toh that explains everything, no?

In its denouement, Ki & Ka draws some rather simplistic conclusions about gender oppression. Still, it would be unwise to brush this film aside, since a lot of its messaging is positive and radical, not just by Bollywood standards but by Indian social norms at large. Whatever be Ki & Ka’s follies, it is still interesting that a mainstream filmmaker thought it fit to make a film with commercially successful stars about a man who wants to be a stay-at-home husband and his careerist wife.

Kareena is the pick of the cast. She is particularly good in her emotionally over-wrought scenes. It is such a joy to see her playing a substantial role after a string of marginal parts in male-centric films. It is also nice to see her deservedly getting top billing in the credits, which is uncommon for women in Bollywood even today, except for the female leads of heroine-centric films.

Ki & Ka’s camera team and lighting technicians though have done the actress a great injustice. So many clear views of her bleached facial hair? We are not supposed to notice that, people! A word about Kia’s wardrobe. After 2014’s Bewakoofiyaan starring Sonam Kapoor and PK with Anushka Sharma, here’s another film that hits the nail on the head with its styling of a female professional.

Arjun’s brooding intensity is always attractive, but he has delivered better performances in the past. Hats off to this youngster though for his experimental chromosome, which has led to the wide variety of characters he has notched up in his filmography in just a four-year-long career.

Swaroop Sampat, who plays Kia’s mother in Ki & Ka, is cute and likeable but she just cannot act. It does not matter, because her presence in the film brings up a wave of nostalgia for a childhood spent viewing Yeh jo hai zindagi on TV with the family every Friday.

The production design too is noteworthy. If you are a train buff, you might want to watch this film simply for the manner in which Kabir redecorates his house.

Increasing numbers of Indian women are refusing to throttle their professional ambitions in favour of managing a home, while a minuscule number of Indian men are opting to take on roles traditionally deemed to be a feminine preserve. In this scenario, a romcom on a stay-at-home husband is very pertinent. Large swathes of Ki & Ka are fun, considerable sections of it are unexpectedly broad-minded, path-breaking for Bollywood and insightful. The problem is that we can section it off in this fashion. Ultimately, what fails the film is its mixed messaging and choppy texture.

Rating (out of five): **1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	126 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/ki-and-ka-review-arjun-kareena-power-through-but-the-film-tries-too-hard-to-be-cool-2706762.html

Photographs & video courtesy: Raindrop Media

Song video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_KpjLhJa1k