Release date:
|
September 23, 2016
|
Director:
|
Leena Yadav
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Radhika Apte,
Surveen Chawla, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Lehar Khan, Riddhi Sen, Mahesh Balraj,
Chandan Anand, Sumeet Vyas, Adil Hussain
Hindi
|
Writer-director Leena Yadav’s Parched
comes to Indian theatres after a year-long run on the international film
festival circuit starting with its global premiere at Toronto 2015. In terms of
storylines, Parched – co-produced by Ajay Devgn, no less – is to impoverished women of
rural India what last week’s much-acclaimed release Pink is to educated, middle-class urban Indian women: both films
are about the physical dangers, prejudice and discrimination women face in
contemporary society, and the consequences of rebellion.
Parched revolves around three friends in a Rajasthan
village. Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee) has been a widow for years now. When he
was alive, her husband used to beat her mercilessly. Now she has an old
mother-in-law to take care of and a wayward son Gulab (Riddhi Sen) who she is
anxious to marry off. Lajjo (Radhika Apte) is childless, chatty and married to
a sadistic alcoholic. The women of the village have begun earning money through
their handicraft skills, a development that causes insecurity and anxiety among
the men.
Bijli (Surveen
Chawla) is the one bright spark in their miserable existence, an erotic dancer
and sex worker in a local entertainment company who might traditionally be
viewed as the most enchained of the lot, yet speaks her
mind more often than Rani and Lajjo would dare. In the presence of others,
these two are cowering, simpering creatures who never question their lot. In
their time together though and especially when they are with Bijli, unfettered
by abusive hands or social scrutiny, they
are unrecognisable: lively women who speak freely of sex, love, lust, their
hopes and dreams.
The most
interesting part of Parched is its
sense of humour, which rears its head unexpectedly in the midst of bleak
circumstances. When the women are laughing together, cracking jokes about their
bodies and their men, they make you smile. How, you wonder, can they find it in
themselves to forget for even a second, the horrors that await them back home?
Yet they do. And you cannot but love them for that miraculous ability.
Equally telling are
the moments when they turn on each other. Rani’s harshness towards her
under-age daughter-in-law Janaki (Lehar Khan) and a flash of anger directed at
Bijli in one scene are
reminders of how women participate in the patriarchy
that dehumanises and subjugates them.
Chatterjee is
efficient as Rani, Apte is a live wire and Chawla is a revelation. The
supporting cast too is dotted with interesting actors though young Khan and Sen
deserve a special mention for their sure-footedness. Elevating the film by several notches is Oscar-winning cinematographer
Russell Carpenter who bathes Parched in warm flames and bright sunlight by turns, paying
equal attention to the beauty of the landscape, the colourful attire of its
inhabitants and the lovely faces of the sensuous women at the centre of the
story.
Yet Parched is a curiously unsatisfying experience.
The issues it highlights – domestic violence, marital rape, child marriage,
male entitlement – are the sort that would naturally draw empathy from a considerate viewer. Why then is it not as gripping as might be
expected?
The answer lies in
the fact that Parched shares more
than a theme with Pink, it also
shares a weakness: an extreme awareness of being a film created specifically to
send out a message about women’s rights. This awareness was evident in the
trite titling of Pink and in the
needless layers of drama laid on thick in the courtroom scenes. Both elements
were far removed from the naturally flowing sensitivity of the rest of the
narrative. Pink worked, nevertheless,
because its self-consciousness was not all-pervasive, and because it got so
completely under the skin of its brilliantly acted female protagonists that
their battles became our battles.
Parched is rarely able to get past its mindfulness of
being a film with a message,
thus failing to lose itself in a story of real people with real,
heart-wrenching problems. There was a scene in Kanu Behl’s Titli last year, in which a man reaches out to his new bride in a
tiny bedroom of the hovel they share with his family, and she wrestles with him
wordlessly, determined to resist his carnal overtures while he seems equally
determined to claim the body he considers his right. It is a scene that gives
me goosebumps of fear at the very memory of it. I cannot think of a single
moment in Parched that as effectively
made me feel the pain these three women feel. Instead, I found myself in the
role of a concerned bystander, not an absorbed, involved viewer.
The problem is with
both the direction and writing by Yadav who earlier
helmed Shabd and Teen Patti. Apart from the detached
nature of the storytelling, there are too
many contrivances thrown in for effect. A nameless, faceless caller seeking a
telephone romance appears to have been introduced for no reason other than to
give the target of his affection the chance to reject him at a later
stage. The final scenes juxtaposed against Dussehra
celebrations in the village take a cliched, superficial view of the Ramayan’s
good-vs-evil battle, apparently forgetting long-standing discussions on the
mistreatment of Sita, among other things.
The film is also
rather literal in its definition of “escape”. If good folk vacate every space
where they face resistance or exploitation, what is left behind? Does escape
necessarily mean a physical exit, and is such an exit even possible
for most people?
Parched also seems designed to appeal to a foreign film
festival crowd that might buy into a dose of good ol’ Indian exotica. Nothing
exemplifies this better than the handsome, dhoti-clad mysterious stranger of
the film (played
by Adil Hussain)
who makes love to women with his words
and hands, driving them to otherworlds of ecstasy. That the credits identify
him as “mystic lover” is amusing, a label no doubt coined to conjure up visions
of The Land of the Kama Sutra as
India was known before the anti-rape movement grabbed headlines in recent
years, a culture where women may experience unbounded sexual pleasure far
removed from spousal savagery.
There is a problem
with that imagery though. It is a fantasy. Just like the film’s climax, which
may be written to draw cheers, but is too conveniently wrapped up, too rushed
and too far removed from reality to match the tone of the early scenes in Parched.
This determination
to pointedly dole out lessons to an audience can be the death knell of any
film. The primary purpose has to be to tell a story. If you are a socially
sensitive storyteller, the lessons will automatically follow. Listing out the
lessons first and then building a story around them is not filmmaking; that
approach is better suited to moral science classes, protest marches, newspaper columns and seminars.
Radhika Apte’s
laughter and Surveen Chawla’s dynamism are a pleasure to behold in Parched. The women’s hesitant
exploration of each other in forbidden areas is riveting, as is the vein of comedy in each
of them. The film is only episodically engaging
though. In its entirety, Parched left
me thirsting for much much more.
Rating
(out of five): **
CBFC Rating (India):
|
A
|
Running time:
|
118 minutes
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
FOOTNOTE
ON SUBTITLING:
Interestingly, Parched has been
released with English subtitles across the country, including the Hindi belt.
We watched a subtitled version at the press preview, so I checked with the
producers to be sure that this is how all of India will see it.
This is a very impressive and progressive move
by Team Parched, considering that most Hindi filmmakers seem to be
labouring under the misconception that Hindi is spoken and well understood in
every corner of India, which it is not. To release a Hindi film with English
subs even in Hindi-speaking states is an acknowledgement of how much our people
travel for work, especially to the political capital, which happens to be in
the Hindi belt. Kudos.
The subs are of good quality to boot. When I occasionally
glanced at them, I did not spot any grammatical or spelling errors, and the
translations were as accurate as translations of film dialogues can be. Good
job.
Subtitles contribute to a culture we should all be aiming for: one
where Indians in India routinely watch all Indian films across languages, not
just our own mother tongues.
Regular readers of my blog will know I have written extensively on this subject this year. Here are some relevant links for new visitors:
Regular readers of my blog will know I have written extensively on this subject this year. Here are some relevant links for new visitors:
The
Diary of a Frustrated Indian Film Buff:
It’s
Not “Regional”, Dammit, It’s “Indian”!
