REVIEW 548: AJJI

Release date:	November 24, 2017
Director:	Devashish Makhija
Cast: Language:	Sushama Deshpande, Smita Tambe, Sharvani Suryavanshi, Sadiya Siddiqui, Rasika Agashe, Sudhir Pandey, Srikant Mohan Yadav, Vikas Kumar, Abhishek Banerjee    Hindi

                                                                                                                   

In one of this film’s most poignant scenes, the 10-year-old rape survivor Manda Kadam asks her grandmother if her bleeding means she has “grown up”. The old lady is momentarily thrown off by the question, then remembers that these are the terms in which she had discussed the onset of puberty with her granddaughter. “Is this how it starts for every girl?” the little one asks.

This exchange underlines the tragedy of the rape of one so young. It is possible that the girl might forever equate the pain of gruesome violation with womanhood and with the natural pain of menstruation. This disturbing realisation also underlines a larger point emerging from writer-director Devashish Makhija’s Ajji, co-written by Mirat Trivedi. As much as Ajji is about a woman out to punish the well-connected man who brutalised her grandchild, it is also about the everydayness of sexual assault in the grubby back alleys of an urban space, where women and girls are attacked with such confidence by men whose shield is the poverty of their victims, that such violence could well end up being viewed by them as an intrinsic part of being a woman.

The latter is a point well made, and one that ideally should have been the overriding theme of Ajji. Not that rape happens only in poorer quarters, but the vulnerabilities of women from different social groups differ. Unfortunately, building a full-length film around this idea and around how real rather than fictional women react in such situations would require a greater investment of thought and imagination than vengeance does.

Rape revenge sagas like Ajji mirror casual drawing-room conversations about how we must kill or castrate rapists without a trial, and silence feminists who disagree. Like such films, such conversations too are rarely about what real survivors do, want or need. They are usually about the people around these women (cases in point: Ajji, Mom, Kaabil), or about society’s fantasy of the rape victim, 1988’s Dimple Kapadia-starrer Zakhmi Aurat being a prime example.

Except in rare instances like last year’s Pink, Hindi cinema would rather not bother with credible portrayals of assault survivors, because women who weep at home but soldier on with life and/or go to court despite their fears are boring, I guess, in comparison with avenging Durgas or our collective illusion about the woman we now call Nirbhaya (The Fearless One).

Ajji, then, is a mixed bag of goods. The film begins with grandma/Ajji (played by Sushama Deshpande) and the sex worker Leela (Sadiya Siddiqui) searching for Manda (Sharvani Suryavanshi) in their squalid slum that is a stone’s throw from a red light area. They find her in a garbage heap and soon discover that her rapist is a local pervert called Dhavle (Abhishek Banerjee), the son of a senior politician. Not unexpectedly, the investigating policeman (Vikas Kumar) is on Dhavle Senior’s payrolls.

The story is moving and telling as it establishes the sense of helplessness in Manda’s family and Ajji’s relationship with Manda. The cop’s casual callousness, the disregard for due process because of the Kadams’ dire circumstances and the parents’ self-preservation instincts are believable and well done.

It is chilling, to say the least, to watch a male cop interrogate and physically examine a female rape victim, a minor to boot, and bring in a male doctor to do a vaginal exam. Those passages are designed to fill a viewer with disgust, anger and a shared pain. I could barely breath as I watched them. DoP Jishnu Bhattacharjee is careful not to be voyeuristic in his gaze on Manda’s body here, and Makhija handles the scenes with sensitivity.

The film goes down a well-worn, stereotypical path though when it acquaints us with Dhavle Junior and deals with Ajji’s quest for revenge. The rapist is not written with any depth, and Ajji’s plan is foolhardy to the point of being silly. Each time she is in her home, the film becomes relatable, each time she steps out to work towards her goal, Ajji acquires a slightly bizarre, noir-ish air. More than empathy with Manda, it gradually becomes about a fascination with this arthritic and aged woman who is as unlikely a vigilante as the sightless hero in Kaabil.

In any case, for a film that clearly aspires to be realistic, the stylised cinematography becomes a diversion after a while. Half the impact of a scene in which Ajji watches Dhavle Junior having sex with a mannequin, for instance, is lost because it becomes too much about how that scene has been shot rather than what is going on. This is not to say that the frames are unattractive, but that these particular framing choices may have worked in another kind of project, but here, in a film that desperately needed to focus on its soul, they are distracting. Equally distracting is the fact that no human beings are to be seen in the slum in which Ajji lives.

Besides, there is a weirdness to the manner in which Ajji stalks Dhavle. Clearly she is not merely tracking his schedule. Clearly staying on to see him achieve an orgasm on a dummy did not help her decide when and where to confront him. The point being made seems to be that she is trying to build up enough revulsion for him within herself, to give her the strength for that final act. Why? Was what he did to Manda not hateful and repulsive enough?

If the answer to that is a yes, then we have to consider whether these scenes were featured simply for effect.

Devashish Makhija, who earlier made the feature film Oonga, earned the spotlight just last year when Taandav, his interesting short featuring Manoj Bajpayee, went viral on Youtube. Ajji and Manda’s relationship, Sushama Deshpande’s striking face and screen presence, and young Sharvani Suryavanshi’s natural acting are no doubt worthy of a full-fledged film. Ajji, as it stands now though, is well begun but just half done.   

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	A
Running time:	103 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ajji-movie-review-moving-till-it-descends-into-the-cliches-of-the-rape-revenge-genre-4225821.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajji

REVIEW 486: NOOR

Release date:	April 21, 2017
Director:	Sunhil Sippy
Cast: Language:	Sonakshi Sinha, Kanan Gill, Shibani Dandekar, Purab Kohli, Smita Tambe, M.K. Raina, Suchitra Pillai, Manish Chaudhari Hindi

Noor Roy Chaudhary is a young mediaperson in Mumbai, keen to practice journalism with meaning, journalism that makes a difference to humanity and is aimed at the larger good. The chasm separating what she wants to do (unearth corruption, for instance) and what she is allowed to by her video news agency (interview Sunny Leone, cover Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not kind of drama) seems unbridgeable, and so she spends her life cribbing about...well...her life.

Then one day Noor catches a newsbreak that she is convinced will make her. In mishandling that report though, she ends up ruining people who matter to her and almost finishing herself.

Director Sunhil Sippy’s Noor is about her reparation and how she gets her world back on track. It is based on the book Karachi: You’re Killing Me by Saba Imtiaz. The screenplay is by Althea Delmas-Kaushal, Shikhaa Sharma and Sippy himself, with dialogues by Ishita Moitra Udhwani.

Before going into a deeper analysis of this film it is important to get this out of the way: the past year has seen a steady flow of self-consciously ‘women-centric’ films in theatres. Most have been hollow, with zero story and zero understanding of or commitment to women. Their sole goal appears to have been to cash in on what the industry sees as a “trend” of women-centric films – like the best Vidya Balan starrers – making big money at the box office. Yes, the makers of such films see women as a “trend”, not people (like men) with lives that are big-screen-worthy for all seasons. The result: they have ended up delivering self-defeating emptiness with thin screenplays and poorly developed female leads, the worst of them being the Sonakshi Sinha-starrer Akira last year. Noor, which too features Sinha in the lead, is thankfully about a story and a woman with a story worth telling, not about Akira-style fake ‘woman-centricity’.

This is what makes Noor watchable despite its flaws, of which there are many. Sippy’s 28-year-old heroine is a believable creature for the most part, often utterly stupid but also credible. She is more than the cutesy froth with which she is introduced to us – messy, always in a hurry, always late, cocksure, tying her hair with the first thing she can find even if that thing happens to be a sock, anxious to have a boyfriend, anxious about her weight, serious in the hours beyond her hard-partying social life. She is more than all the above because Noor has clearly thought out, clearly articulated feelings, goals and dreams, and the screenplay enables us to truly get to know this crazy woman in all her crazy, mixed-up glory.

Just when you think Noor is headed in the direction of being yet another Bridget Jones (meaning: a character written with a veneer of liberalism but no real pre-occupation beyond worrying about her next boyfriend and her next lay), the writing team thankfully goes elsewhere.

Noor speaks lines mirroring the language of a real youngster from her background in Mumbai – for the most part. I repeat “for the most part” here too, because her “tu”, “tumhara” and casual impertinence towards her fatherly editor-owner is pretentious wannabe coolth authored by someone who seems to have a rather irritating stereotypical notion of how news offices function. It is a major flaw in a film that is otherwise not overtly trying to impress.

Noor’s botched-up big break provokes us to think of the ephemeral impact of news coverage not backed by commitment and follow-ups. What happens when the cameras go away and real human beings are left to their own devices, at the mercy of the powers that be just as they were before the spotlight fell on them? This is the overriding takeaway from the film, which makes even its failings forgivable.

Sonakshi Sinha pulls off her character without appearing to try too hard. Her natural performance as Noor once again raises the question: why does she waste herself primarily on Akshay Kumar starrers and the like that demean women and relegate her to being no more than a pout and large eyes and an attractive profile?

The supporting cast is interesting. Kanan Gill and Shibani Dandekar both have attractive personalities and it would be nice to see if they can pull off larger roles. M.K. Raina as Noor’s Dad is a sweetheart. In fact, the film might have benefited from exploring his character further. Manish Chaudhari brings depth to his performance as Noor’s boss, even if the treatment of her relationship with him leaves much to be desired.

The pick of the cast though is the wonderful Smita Tambe playing a poor woman caught between a corrupt system and irresponsible journalism.

The film’s pluses do not eclipse its minuses though. Its news office milieu is poorly sketched, and while showing Noor re-reporting a news story that was treated cursorily at first, it does not bother to explain what “research” she added to it beyond saying that she did. Such superficiality takes away from the film’s good intentions.

Towards the end, when it seems like Noor is about to lose her way again, this time to become a conformist, a senior tells her: Having found yourself with such difficulty, are you already forgetting that self? It is an excellent line perfectly placed in the film. Unfortunately, it can equally be applied to Sippy’s approach to this work. Just as he has convinced us that Noor is a person of substance who is complete unto herself, he quickly slaps a romance on to his storyline, as if to hurriedly satisfy conventional Hindi film viewers who may consider a romantic interest an essential part of any film and more conservative viewers who consider a woman incomplete without a man. Worse, he then wraps up his film with an ‘item’ song in which Noor dances in a little dress and is pushed around by a man, as women tend to be in formulaic Hindi films.

C’mon, Mr Sippy, why not go all the way? Why be apologetic about the point you make?

That said, I would still like very much to see the director’s next film. This is his return as a helmsman after a gap of 17 years (I confess I have not managed to find his first film, Snip!, released in 2000). Here is hoping that Film No. 3 is more confident of itself and we do not have to wait another 17 years for it.

Ditto for Sonakshi Sinha. Four years have flown between the remarkable Lootera and Noor which, despite its follies, serves as a good showcase for her talent. Here is hoping we do not have to wait another four years for a film that does not treat her like a prop.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	116 minutes 24 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/noor-movie-review-sonakshi-sinhas-film-is-flawed-but-its-not-akira-style-fake-woman-centricity-3396604.html

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