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Release
date:
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October 25, 2019
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Director:
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Tushar Hiranandani
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Cast:
Language:
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Taapsee Pannu, Bhumi Pednekar, Vineet Kumar Singh, Prakash Jha,
Sara Arjun, Himanshu Sharma, Pawan Chopra, Kuldeep Sareen, Navneet
Srivastava, Nikhat Khan, Shaad Randhawa
Hindi
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If Saand Ki
Aankh had been fiction, chances are it would have been dismissed as
“improbable” and “typical Bollywood masala”. We know this about the
truth yet keep forgetting: it is not just stranger than fiction, it is gutsier,
funnier and more adventurous, as this gloriously entertaining film reminds
us.
Saand Ki
Aankh is based on the lives of sisters-in-law Chandro and Prakashi Tomar who first picked up a gun in their 60s and have gone
on to become multiple-medal-winning shooting champions. Now in their 80s, the
Shooter Daadis of Uttar Pradesh’s Johri village have riddled
glass ceilings with bullet holes and paved the way for more women (including
Prakashi’s daughter Seema who is an international champ in the sport) to step
out of their homes in a state otherwise notorious for gender discrimination and
violence.
Two quick points
before diving deep into this review: first, Saand Ki Aankh is smashing good fun, as are Taapsee Pannu
and Bhumi Pednekar playing the feisty leads; second, however
impressive the two actors may be, the casting of young women to play old women
subtracts from the impact of the film by placing a question mark on the team’s
commitment to its own messaging. This is an industry in which director Rajkumar Hirani
and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra cast a then 44-year-old Aamir Khan, 39-year-old
R. Madhavan and 30-year-old Sharman Joshi as teenagers in 3 Idiots as recently as 2009, where male superstars for decades have
continued to play youth while in their 50s in reality, but women actors
beyond their mid-30s are/have been routinely discarded, which is why it hurts
so much that even in a progressive film such as this one, women artistes
in their 60s have been deemed unworthy of playing women in their 60s.
It is possible to
enjoy Saand Ki Aankh and
find it inspiring, yet be aware that, however giant a leap it may be for
womankind, it is but a small step towards a day when
a Bollywood producer might put their money on a project with a
Ms Pednekar and a Ms Pannu playing the younger Chandro and
Prakashi while the Tomars’ 60-plus avatars are played by a
Neena Gupta and a Ratna Pathak Shah (my dream cast for this film) or
Shabana Azmi, Hema Malini, Rekha or any one of the numerous talented and
gorgeous women who currently grace Hindi filmdom in supporting roles. For the
record, this is exactly how the men in the story have been cast: the young
Tomar husbands are played by young actors, whereas older actors play them in
their later years.
Now that I have let
off steam about this disappointment, let me tell you what a rollicking
ride Saand Ki Aankh is.
The narrative opens
in the late 1990s on the first occasion when Chandro (Pednekar) and Prakashi
(Pannu) deceive their husbands and leave their village for a shooting
tournament. The story then flashes back to the ’50s when Prakashi enters the
household as a bride. She and Chandro instantly connect. Their friendship
carries them through a dreary existence that includes unending
work in the fields and at home, pregnancy after unwanted
pregnancy (unwanted by the women, while their men do not care either way just
so long as they get to have sex and sons), and the resentment they harbour
against their spouses whose occupations are restricted to impregnating their
wives, selling crops the wives have harvested, pocketing the money and lording
it over the women.
Plenty has been reported
about the Tomars in the media. Theirs is a fascinating tale calling out to be
made into a film. Saand Ki Aankh
is directed by debutant Tushar Hiranandani whose 15-year filmography as a
writer covers a spectrum of comedies ranging from the misogynistic Great Grand Masti to the pleasant Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge. He does not
do to this film what Hindi cinema has long assumed should be done to all women-centric
narratives: he does not make it a weepie, nor write a male ‘saviour’ into the
Tomars’ saga, nor turn the women into violent avenging angels of the sort that
have crowded mainstream films about rape survivors from Zakhmi Aurat to Mom.
Saand Ki Aankh (written by Balwinder Janjua
and co-produced by Anurag Kashyap) is hugely funny and uplifting,
yet it never makes light of the grave risks Chandro and Prakashi took while travelling
for competitions initially without informing their regressive, restrictive
menfolk. In that sense, Hiranandani maintains a perfect tone as he
takes us on this rip-roaring ride, deep into a fire that patriarchy could
not douse.
The conservative
men in the film are not caricatured, they are ridiculed in a cleverly understated
fashion. The women do find support among some men in the family, the village
and beyond, but Saand Ki Aankh
fortunately does not belong to the Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan School of
Cinema that has yielded films like Mission Mangal and Tiger Zinda Hai in
which fictional men appropriated the real-life achievements of real-life
women to give these male superstars larger-than-life roles of the sort they
covet. The Daadis’ coach, for instance, is a well-rounded, neatly written
character, but at no point do Janjua and Hiranandani paint him as a knight
in shining armour ‘rescuing’ the women from their fate: if there is any
rescuing to be done, the women do it themselves. He is at all times portrayed
as a darling, a visionary and an ally, but never a saviour.
Sudhakar Reddy
Yakkanti’s cinematography, Devendra Murdeshwar’s editing and Vishal Mishra’s
delightfully buoyant music are designed to ensure that the coach is not allowed
to steal Chandro and Prakashi’s thunder. Who the camera lingers on, who gets
those lionising low-angle shots, who the editor and director end each scene
with – these choices go a long way towards establishing the supremacy of one
character over another in a narrative. With its carefully considered decisions
in these departments, Saand Ki Aankh
leaves us in no doubt that Chandro and Prakashi are its protagonists, period.
Hindi film
soundtracks have for a while now been toplined by men. Even in last year’s
otherwise forward-thinking Veere Di Wedding in which women dominated the
storyline, men inexplicably dominated the music (including with a song in which
the female leads lip synced to Badshah’s voice). In Saand Ki Aankh, women rule the songs all the way down to the
celebratory number running over the closing credits.
As important as all
this is the choice of narrator. Most Bollywood films have men, preferably men
with booming baritones, introducing and recounting stories, the unspoken
implication being that a voice of authority must perforce be male. Saand Ki Aankh opts instead for a
little girl (Sara Arjun), the very one for whose sake a 60-something
grandmother picked up the gun in the first place.
Ms Arjun – award-winning
star of the Tamil film Deiva Thirumagal
and the Malayalam Ann Maria Kalippilaanu
– does full justice to her role as a diffident kid who sprouts wings under Chandro
and Prakashi’s watchful eyes. She along with the consistently wonderful Vineet
Kumar Singh (Bombay Talkies, Mukkabaaz) playing the Daadis’ coach, director-turned-actor
Prakash Jha as their older brother-in-law and sweet little Himanshu Sharma (Dear Dad) as a hapless pawn turned
advocate for the heroines’ cause, form part of Saand Ki Aankh’s large and able supporting cast.
Given the task of
playing women double their age, Pannu and Pednekar come up trumps in their turn
as cheery, fire-breathing warriors. They manage this despite
the inconsistent make-up and lighting, which, among other things, leaves
their hands youthful forever.
While the two
actors occasionally slip up in their gait and posture as old women, they
look so confident as shooters that it is as if they were born to wield
fire-arms (I will defer to language experts to assess their accents
in the Hindi-Haryanvi dialect spoken in this film). Pannu and Pednekar have sharp
comic timing, they play off each other well, and it is as much to their credit
as the director’s and writer’s that neither star lures the spotlight away from
the other, instead delivering equally finely tuned, sensitive performances.
TV serials in
languages across India are filled with nasty women scheming against other
women. While women are no doubt often women’s enemies, it is just as true that
the entertainment media and the popular public discourse tend to downplay the
backroom alliances that women have formed for centuries in their bid to survive
back-breaking patriarchy. Saand Ki Aankh
stands out as a fine illustration of women who look out for each other, not
just in Chandro and Prakashi’s life-long friendship but also in their quiet
understanding with the other women in that massive joint family.
The only truly
problematic patch in the narrative comes at a party thrown by an erstwhile
royal family to which the Daadis are invited. A clash of cultures is
inevitable at their maiden encounter with champagne, forks and finger
bowls, but instead of being merely amusing, the storytelling here briefly gets
patronising towards them for the first and only time in the film. Thankfully
this rough spot passes soon enough.
Saand Ki Aankh’s often exuberant facade belies its thoughtful
nature. As much as they are means of repression, the ghungats worn by the
leads, like the veils in Lipstick Under My Burkha, also become means they use to escape repression. I was not comfortable with a
character justifying the forced sterilisations of men undertaken during
the Emergency, but the women’s bemused reaction to this autocratic move serves
as a striking comment on how the oppression of the oppressor could unwittingly
benefit the oppressed.
Saand Ki Aankh has all the pizzazz that its name, which is
explained within the film, suggests it will. Even in its most comical
moments, it is deeply moving because the women are fighting for rights that no
human being should ever have to demand: the right to dream, the right to make
their own decisions, the right to just have a good time. Watching it is to
set off on an emotional rollercoaster of reactions, running the gamut from delirious
joy at the heroines’ achievements to anger on their behalf, fear, laughter,
tears and whoops of celebration.
Since the MeToo movement
spread across India last October, an ugly generational divide has emerged among
feminists, with some seeing no irony in directing ageist taunts at “older
feminists” and refusing to acknowledge the contributions of those who have
battled before us. Precisely a year later, Saand Ki
Aankh is a timely reminder that no matter what our differences may be with
them, we all stand on the shoulders of the Chandros and Prakashis of
the world who endangered themselves to crash through closed doors so that you
and I may now walk through them unscathed.
Rating (out
of five stars): ***1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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149 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
