REVIEW 618: DHADAK

Release date:	July 20, 2018
Director:	Shashank Khaitan
Cast: Language:	Janhvi, Ishaan, Ashutosh Rana, Kharaj Mukherjee, Shridhar Watsar, Ankit Bisht, Ishika Gajneja Hindi with some Bengali

Sairat – Nagraj Popatrao Manjule’s critically acclaimed Marathi blockbuster of which Dhadak is an official remake – was a film about love across caste divides, chilling and entertaining in equal measure. What made it unique on India’s cinematic landscape was that though it placed the gravity of casteism firmly at the centre of its narrative, it was an unapologetically commercial film with a determination to be viewed as mainstream and massy, complete with glossy packaging, striking visuals and Ajay-Atul’s fantastic, cheerful songs. It was as unequivocal about its caste concerns and its focus on a romance between a poor low-caste boy and a wealthy upper-caste girl in rural Maharashtra.

Dhadak (Heartbeat) seems to have completely missed the point of its source material. 

The star-crossed lovers in writer-director Shashank Khaitan’s Hindi version of Sairat are Parthavi Singh and Madhukar Bagla. When they first meet they are immature college kids in Udaipur but are soon catapulted into maturity by the hard knocks of life. Her father is a powerful and unscrupulous Rajasthan politician and hotelier, her mother a silent sidekick in the marriage. His parents run a small restaurant in the same city. She is a spoilt brat. He is an obedient son who assists his Mum and Dad at work.

The two have already caught each other’s eye when the film opens. Madhukar’s father becomes aware that something is going on between them, and warns his son against persisting down that path because “voh oonchi jaati ke log hai” (they are upper caste). His fears are well founded as Parthavi and Madhukar learn when her family finds out about their relationship.

Within the constraints of the commercial space where nuance is often viewed as a minus point, Sairat managed to abound with detail about the girl’s family, the boy’s friendships, their differing circumstances and most of all, caste. Dhadak is bereft of detail from start to finish in almost every aspect of its game.

Why, for one, bother to make a film about an inter-caste romance if you are afraid to discuss caste? It is almost bizarre but true that when Dhadak’s finale is past, you realise that this shameful Indian reality was the elephant in the room Khaitan did not address, as though by doing so his candyfloss and popcorn would acquire a bitter taste. That is as weird as revisiting Anand and not mentioning death, or deleting trade unions from a Namak Haraam remake.  

Dhadak’s trepidation – or is it apathy? – is in keeping with the attitude of post-1980s Bollywood, in which filmmakers have virtually ignored the existence of India’s lower castes. Their blinkered vision has led to three decades of films in which the world has revolved around Brahmins, Kshatriyas and the occasional Vaishya, while oppressed castes have been erased from the picture. In the matter of representation in scripts, Bollywood has a lot to learn from its counterparts in Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu cinema.

The aversion to a scrutiny of caste takes on ridiculous proportions though when a Marathi film that was entirely about a caste-ridden social landscape fraught with danger is remade in Hindi but the remake not only does not specify the boy’s jaati, it references the subject just in passing, and has absolutely nothing to say about the intricacies of human equations in these tricky settings.

To further sanitise itself, perhaps because the poor are deemed too dirty and too much of an inconvenience when you know only how to create fluff, the poverty-stricken background of Sairat’s hero is scrubbed out of the frame and replaced by lower middle class parents for Madhukar in Dhadak. (Possible spoiler alert) Likewise, when Archi and Parshya escape their village in Sairat, they begin a new life in a filthy slum in Hyderabad, but in Dhadak instead their struggles are transported to a scruffy but not-a-slum block of matchbox-sized apartments in Kolkata. (Spoiler alert ends)

Perhaps it is too much to expect sensitivity and inclusion from a director whose last film – Badrinath Ki Dulhania starring Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan – romanticised, sympathised with and justified a leading man’s violence towards the heroine, going so far as to have her exonerate him and blame herself for his actions.

Badrinath was disturbing. Dhadak, on the other hand, is just plain hollow. Even as a conventional rich-girl-poor-boy romance, it fails miserably, because of the superficially written bond between the lead pair. The first half is devoted to their aankhon hi aankhon mein ishaara ho gaya style love affair filled with stolen glances and perilous rendezvous, but barely a conversation. There is no depth in their characterisation that might help us understand their willingness to risk life and limb for each other later on.

One of the problematic aspects of Sairat was the writing of the girl as a clichéd heroine who initially plays fast and loose with the hero to test his commitment to her, a couple of times knowingly putting him – and herself for that matter – in great jeopardy. In fact, the big turning point in the plot, the moment her family discovers that they are together, is a result of this behaviour. Not surprisingly, Khaitan gets the woman-as-a-tease part of Sairat down pat.

That, however, is all that he manages to capture from Archi and Parshya’s blossoming affection. In the original, time and thought are invested in acquainting us with Archi’s intrinsically fiery nature, and the way she is indulged by her otherwise imperious Dad. It is because we know how much he dotes on her that his subsequent viciousness has the impact it does. It is because we know what a firebrand she is that her subsequent decisions become believable. In Dhadak, these elements too are sketchily written, as are the pair’s struggles in their new life away from their parents.  

What works in Dhadak are Madhukar’s early scenes with his friends (played sweetly by Shridhar Watsar and Ankit Bisht) which inject humour and verve into the proceedings. The snapshots of life in Kolkata in the second half too are interestingly done, and in fact far more insightful than the time spent in Udaipur. And this being a Dharma Productions undertaking, it is filled with resplendent visuals, of course. Vishnu Rao’s cinematography beautifully captures Udaipur in all its delicious glory by day and by night. Rao’s camerawork has already got me planning my next trip to the city, since my last time there was far more rewarding than the trip to the theatre for this vacuous film.

Ajay-Atul’s music was fabulous in Sairat, and is unarguably the best thing about Dhadak too. But the lack of a deserving screenplay to wrap itself around robs it of some of its charm, and I say that even of the heartstoppingly good Yad lagla which has been reworked as Pehli baar with Hindi lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya and still in the voice of the wonderful Ajay Gogavale.

This brings us to Dhadak’s much-hyped newcomers Janhvi and Ishaan, she the debutant daughter of pan-India screen legend Sridevi and producer Boney Kapoor, he the half brother of actor Shahid Kapoor and son of Neelima Azeem. Charisma can come through even when it is burdened by faulty writing. Sadly, Janhvi lacks personality and delivers a colourless performance as Parthavi. Ishaan is kinda cute, but he too does not yet possess the screen presence to make a mark in this lacklustre scenario.

In a poorly scripted joke directed at Kangna Ranaut last year, Dhadak’s producer Karan Johar, actors Saif Ali Khan and Varun Dhawan had stood on a stage and chanted the words “nepotism rocks”. No man, Karan, it does not, especially when it means giving big-banner, high-profile breaks to youngsters who would not have got a toe in the door in mainstream Bollywood if it were not for their connections.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	137 minutes 54 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/dhadak-movie-review-janhvi-ishaan-are-so-so-in-an-insipid-sairat-remake-that-is-afraid-to-discuss-caste-4781021.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DhadakMovie/

… OF ZAKHMI WOMEN AND PUTHIYA LAWS

Indian cinema’s fondness for post-rape revenge sprees continues with Sridevi’s Mom. But such films let “us” off lightly

By Anna MM Vetticad

(This article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on July 15, 2017.)

Most human beings have felt it at some point in their lives: an anger so overpowering that in that moment, you wanted to kill the person who had infuriated you. Few of us give in to that primal urge. Devki does.

In her new Hindi film Mom, Sridevi plays Devki, a high-school teacher who methodically executes the men involved in her daughter’s gangrape, after a court frees them. Mom’s first half is heartbreaking and credible as it establishes the mother-child relationship, portrays the rape with extreme sensitivity and shows us the family’s initial battle to retain sanity. The narrative changes track completely though when Devki sets off on her applause-inducing rampage. This is not self-defence or spur-of-the-moment violence, but carefully planned revenge. It is the Zakhmi Aurat Syndrome all over again, harking back to the 1988 Hindi film Zakhmi Aurat (Wounded Woman) in which a policewoman played by Dimple Kapadia joins forces with rape survivors like herself to bobbitise their attackers.

Like Bollywood, India’s other big film industries too have, over the years, delivered a small crop of populist films favouring vigilante justice for rape. Just last year, Nayanthara and Mammootty starred in the Malayalam film Puthiya Niyamam (New Law), which was about a woman killing her rapists with help from unexpected quarters. Another high-profile Mollywood film from the genre, 22 Female Kottayam in 2012 had Rima Kallingal’s character killing a rapist and castrating his accomplice.

Admittedly, real women rarely react in this fashion, but how can a spot of fantasy hurt, you ask? Besides, zakhmi women are still not a common occurrence whereas zakhmi men have been the bedrock of escapist Indian cinema for decades, taking the law into their hands in droves when the ‘system’ fails them.

Well, at an artistic level it is true that both are clichés, but at a sociological level, there is no equivalence between them. The unrealistically vengeful man of cinema does not carry with him the same baggage of off-screen social prejudice that the woman does. He, therefore, calls for a separate discussion.

Commercial cinema down the decades has swung wildly from the female rape victim with no agency — who weeps helplessly or commits suicide, while her male relatives or lover exact revenge for her lost ‘izzat’ (honour) — to another extreme, where she metamorphoses into a raging Goddess Durga. The latter is an extension of our national vocabulary, which perennially pedestalises the female as “mata” or “devi”, a deification that then becomes an excuse to deny women the right to be ordinary humans — flawed, fearful, normal, like men. When women deviate from these superhuman standards set by society, the penalty is harsh, whereas men — seen as hapless slaves of their hormones and feminine wiles — are casually absolved of grave crimes. While saying, “Ladke hai, galti ho jaati hai (after all they are boys, mistakes happen),” UP neta Mulayalam Singh Yadav echoed a widely held view of rapists emerging from this mindset.

The rape-victim-as-avenging-Durga cliché comes from film industries that almost never give space to stories of ordinary, believably tough women responding to sexual violence (Bollywood’s Pink in 2016 being an exception).

Vengeance is a quick route to applause. Watching a woman chop the genitals off a sexual predator can be deeply satisfying for those of us frustrated with the ‘system’, but such films do not compel us to introspect about our own part in that system and a culture that socially sanctions rape. These films point fingers at everyone but the citizenry. Why demand self-questioning, I guess, if letting viewers feel self-righteous pays off?

By cheering Devki in Mom, do we not prove that “we”, the good people watching her, are disgusted with rapists, that “we” are different from “them”? So what if at home we have conversations with our sons blaming women’s attire for rape? So what if our sons see evidence of women as lesser beings in the relationship of inequality between Mum and Dad? Stop this feminist bullshit, please! “Our” boys do not commit rape, only “they” do.

Films like Mom let “us” off lightly.

There is another point worth considering. In recent years, India has displayed a bizarre need to attribute qualities to anonymous rape victims that would give us the drive to fight for them — as if their being humans is not enough. The news media’s nicknames for these women reflect this attitude. In 2014’s Uber case she became Veera (the brave one), the toddler gangraped in a basement in 2013 became Gudiya (doll), and of course there was Nirbhaya (the fearless one) from 2012.

What if that woman was cowering in fright in that taxi? What if that child was not Barbie-like? What if that physiotherapy intern was begging for mercy? Would they then not be worthy of our empathy and support?

Rape victims and their families should not be objects of public fantasy. Like it or not, Vasuki of Puthiya Niyamam and Devki of Mom are the cinematic equivalents of our imagined Nirbhaya, The Fearless One. It is as if X, The Ordinary One — on or off screen — does not deserve us.

(This is the concluding piece of Film Fatale)

Link to the version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/mom-indian-cinemas-fondness-for-postrape-revenge/article9765674.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “…And The Games The Thackerays Play”

(a shorter version was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink)

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2017/06/and-games-thackerays-play.html

Photographs courtesy:

Mom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_(film)

Puthiya Niyamam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puthiya_Niyamam

Zakhmi Aurat: IMDB

REVIEW 504: MOM

Release date:	July 7, 2017
Director:	Ravi Udyawar
Cast: Language:	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):	UA
Running time:	147 minutes 43 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/mom-movie-review-goddess-sridevi-is-lost-to-bollywoods-eternal-cliches-on-sexual-assault-3785625.html

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