Ammu: Amazon’s arresting rumination on domestic violence gives Aishwarya Lekshmi a role of a wife-time

Charukesh Sekar’s Ammu in Telugu, which began streaming on Amazon Prime from October 19, is a film that was meant for greatness. It has all the seeds of a truly remarkable film on domestic abuse. And more importantly it  has Aishwarya, not Rai, but Lekshmi, who was the  best thing about Mani Ratnam’s cryptic Ponniyin Selvan.

In Ammu, this pretty talented young actress gets the role of a wifetime: she gets to play the wife of a bully-cop Ravi (Naveen Chandra), who has all his colleagues at his precinct eating out of his hand as a hero. But secretly, he is a cowardly bully who generously uses his  hand (and belt) on his wife when she forgets to bring his khaana to the thaana on time.

The buildup towards the violent secret is remarkably smooth. Writer-director Charukesh Sekar leans into the husband’s masked meanness with a sensitivity that makes the brutality all the more wince-worthy.

Sadly, as it happens with many abused wives, it is not ‘wince’ bitten twice shy for Ammu. The  dismaying acceptance and normalization of domestic violence (“it must be my fault, I must be doing something wrong,” she tells a beggar, who looks nothing like a beggar, with whom she strikes up a conversation at a bus stop) is charted through Ammu’s reaction to the violence that she has to face in the four walls of her home.

I liked the conversation  Ammu has with her mother at a temple where the mother recalls  her mother advising her to take the spousal beating because the husband feels empowered to be violent as he has the stressful job of a wage earner. Ammu’s mother quickly dismisses this line of thought at rubbish.

“Don’t take the violence,” the mother counsels.

In the first-half Aishwarya Lekshmi projects heartbreaking amounts of vulnerability and resilience, conveying both the terror and confusion of the wife. I couldn’t help comparing this Aishwarya’s response to domestic abuse with that of the other Aishwarya in the late Jagmohan Mundhra’s Provoked.

Naveen Chandra in a thankless role of her violent husband, is terrifying in his outbursts, a  performance several notches above Vijay Varma in that other far more quirky film Darlings on domestic violence .

Ammu, at least till midpoint, is more straightforward in projecting the trauma and humiliation of physical abuse. Ammu is nowhere close to the Malayalam film Ottamuri Velicham in showing spousal abuse. Halfway through Ammu, the director decided to make another film. A new character, a parolee out to attend his sister’s wedding played by Bobby Simha, suddenly appears out of nowhere to play the joker of the pack.

What transpires from that point onwards is so out of character with the rest of the film that it almost seems like I was watching two different films.

The will to self-destruct is strong in this narrative, just as it is in our protagonist Ammu, who  takes a very long time to understand that she is not responsible for the abuse that she suffers. The protagonist gets a second chance. In real life, there are re-takes. You get a  chance to mend the moribund situation. Sadly, in filmmaking, there are no second chances. A flawed film is out there forever. Ammu will have to live with its near-fatal flaws.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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