First Take | When domestic abuse in cinema hit us hard

Domestic abuse in the entertainment news, what with Netflix’s Darlings about a  power-drunk, and drunk-drunk  husband using his hands liberally on his wife, turning out to be the digital ‘hit’ of the season. Director Jasmeet K Reen and her actor/producer Alia Bhatt need to be congratulated for bringing into light the darkness of domestic  violence.

Light reminds me of the 2017 Malayalam film Ottamuri Velicham, one of the best films on domestic  violence I’ve ever seen, it is chilling in its portrayal of a newly-married wife’s growing realization that her husband is  a sadist.

Among the many tortuous rituals that the husband Chandran (Deepak Parambol) follows night after night is to keep a multi-coloured light on overhead in the handkerchief-sized cubicle he  shares with his wife Sudha(Vinitha  Koshy).

When one night, she gently suggests that they put off the light as it keeps her awake the whole night, the husband thrashes the wife severely. At the end of the harrowing but edifying film, when she’s gotten rid of the brute, the first thing Sudha does is to break that glaring overhead in her room.

Normally, an extinguished light is a symbol of despair. Here, it signifies the opposite for Sudha. For her silently screaming performance, Vinitha Koshy won a special jury award at the Kerala State Awards. I think she deserved a  lot more. She plays the abused wife as a victim, yes. But not a hopeless pitiable victim.

There is a determination in her eyes to escape, which I did not see in Alia Bhatt’s eyes in Darlings, or in Aishwarya Rai’s eyes in Jagmohan Mundhra’s Provoked or in Preity Zinta’s eyes in Deepa Mehta’s Heaven On Earth. In both the Mundhra and Mehta films, the abusive husband, Naveen Andrews in Provoked and Vansh Bhardwaj in Heaven On Earth, was played with far more conviction than the abused wife.

The same is true to some extent in Darlings, where I thought Vijay Varma was stupendously grey, artfully abusive. This is not to take away from Alia Bhatt’s performance. If we say Sunil Dutt was better than Nargis in Mother India (which I think he was), it doesn’t diminish the colossal impact of the female hero’s performance.

In Ottamuri Velicham, Vinitha Koshy holds the camera with her dear life. Every minute of her screen-time, she projects a desperate determination to makea run, because Darlings, for her marriage, ain’t no fun. The turning point is a wedding that Sudha attends with her husband. There, he humiliates her in front of the horrified guests.

Admirably, the abused wife’s life is not bereft of kindness. Sudha’s mother-in-law (played by the great Pauly Valsan) is affectionate and empathetic but unable to stop her son from traumatizing Sudha. Rather, the mother-in-law counsels Sudha to take the abuse quietly, for that is what women are supposed to do.

Ottamuri Velicham wears a haunting shrouded look of anxiety and despair. Cinematographer Luke Jose shoots the foliage-filled topography as thought it secretes an unspeakable sadness. As for director Rahul Riji Nair, this film shows an assured auteur who knows how to penetrate a troubled house noiselessly, at work. Nair is far more in control of his narrative here than in his recent release Keedam.

Writer-director  Rahul Riji Nair’s Keedam, in Malayalam, falls abysmally short of expectations. Nair’s debut film Ottamuri Velicham about marital rape suffered from no acceptance anxiety. The success of his earlier film puts  a burden on Nair and it shows in Keedam which starts off promisingly as a societal statement on crank calls and stalking, and then builds into an embarrassing revenge-story ,replete with a kidnapping and the heroine being rescued from sure-death by a brave cop (Vijay Babu), who also happens to be the heroine Radhika (Rajisha Vijayan)’s father’s well-wisher.

It all seems like a brave, even pathbreaking startup—I can’t remember seeing a notable Indian film on cyberstalking—and then it all settles down to being more audience-friendly than true to its own intentions. To be honest, the heroine’s kidnapping is brutally stagey: more amateurish in vision than execution. The hoodlums who abduct Radhika, conveniently leave a cellphone near her: yes, that’s how smug the storytelling gets.

This is not the first time that writer-director Rahul Riji Nair has worked with Rajisha Nair. Their earlier collaboration was the sports drama Kho-Kho. The idea of coaching an all-girls’ kabbaddi team to victory is as  tempting as the all-girls’ hockey team in Shimit Amin’s Chak De, which came a good 14 years ago. Like the coach Shah Rukh in Chak De, Rajisha Vijayan comes to the potentially triumphant sports team with a lot of negative  emotional baggage. Maria’s marriage isn’t in the pink of health. She has left behind a highly disgruntled  husband (Venkitesh VP) who wants his wife to look after his mother while he busies himself with various failed business ventures, leaving them in a financial mess.

 Yup, for this couple, it is ‘Till debt do us part.’  Like a lot of teacher-heroes in our cinema, Maria is trying to seek a way out of her own problems in a godforsaken school in a far-flung town. What sets her apart from the other Alices of aridland, is her disposition to work on whim and act on impulse even at the risk of seeming inconsistent. Maria  has married a man her father doesn’t approve of, and lost the chance to be a state-level athlete. But when in the present, the captain of  the  kho-kho team Anju (Mamitha Baiju, well played) falls for the team manager (Ranjit Shekar Nair), Maria puts her foot down and even threatens to throw Anju out of the team.

Though, there is some interesting acting all across the film(the director Raju Riji Nair who plays the heroine’s  colleague in Keedam,  plays Maria’s unctuous cheesy colleague with just the right level of humour) it is the unknown actor playing Anju’s father who leaves a lingering impact when he tells Anju why he can’t see tears in his daughter’s eyes. Kho Kho doesn’t aspire to be a sports epic. There is no grand tournament at the end, no enforced interludes of  victory. The narration moves at its own volition generating warmth  out of the  raw material of honesty rather than showmanship. The  inter-relationships between Maria and her  husband(reminiscent  of  Vidya Balan and her  husband in the recent Sherni),  between Maria and  the  captain of the team Anju and specially between Maria and her dead father, are  tenderly woven into the sports drama.

Kho Kho has no great moments of revelation. But it does convey a subdued sense of outrage at the way the boys whistle at girls playing what’s considered a boys’ game, or the way the male teachers talk to or talk about Maria. But the protests are never aggressive. And the game of kabbaddi is not an excuse to hammer in a message on gender  equality. These girls play kho-kho because….well, it’s there. Someone has to do the muddy job.

Keedam lacks the spontaneous ire of Kho-Kho. It wants to tell a strong story of female empowerment but doesn’t quite know how to balance out the feminists element with the formulistic ingredients. On the admirable side, there is the absence of a love interest for the heroine. Rather, the film focuses on Radhika’s bonding with her retired father (Sreenivasan), whose fear of his daughter being harmed is the most authentic emotion in this  otherwise-ersatz endeavour, which starts off as a comment on sexual predatoriness but gets lost in trying to be an entertainer rather than an informer.

Domestic took another twist and turn in Vikramaditya Motwane’s first, and in my opinion, by far the best film of his career, Udaan. Released in 2010, Motwane designs the uneasy and violent relationship between the 17-year old Rohan (Rajat Barmecha) and his tyrannical father (Ronit Roy), who's almost villainous in his despotism.

When Udaan is not busy trying to be a regular nudge-nudge-wink-wink coming-of-age film (Billy Elliot-goes-to-Jamshedpur), it gives us some great moments of cinema, done in shades that leave the camera lens far behind to romance the very core of middleclass life (no doubt corroded and outdated) in the soporific 'steel town' .

The film starts with a mildly amusing boys-disastrous-night-out-from-boarding- school sequence and then quickly gets down to the serious business on hand of telling us that Rohan's father has not met his son for eight years. Why? We never really get to know. And this remains the otherwise-exemplary work's one biggest flaw. Though played with energetic antipathy by Ronit Roy, the father's unreasonable autocracy makes the man appear as no more than a subtle caricature of lousy parenting.

The delicate moments emerge in the tale of self-realization through Rohan's inner moral churning and of course, through the young actor Rajat Barmecha's instinctive understanding of his character's turmoil. Barmecha's expressions of anguish rage helplessness and finally retaliation and protest are so smoothly conveyed, you almost feel he is playing a character he knows first-hand.

Barmecha gives the narrative a compelling consistency. Director Motwane does the rest. His eye for visual and emotional detail is never over-punctuated. A certain delicacy even when tackling a subject as thorny as the father-child domestic violence runs through the narrative, rendering the characterizations and their motivations not only lucid but eminently palatable and engaging. It's interesting to see how Motwane employs the tradition misunderstood-protagonist-against-a-heartless-word formula to the coming-of-age saga. Barmecha's poet-hero is a clever subverted carryover of Guru Dutt in Pyasa.

In Pyasa, Dutt stood up to an insensitive world. Here, it is the boorish father who won't let his son be a poet. This rare and precious film about straitjacketed claustrophobic middleclass values derives its strength from the unpunctuated uncluttered dramatic force that emerges from the main relationships. By the time Rohan walks out on his loutish father with his little stepbrother, we are no longer looking at Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan's uneasy father-son rapport in Ramesh Sippy's Shakti. We are on to something far more disturbing and contemporary.

Each time the despotic father in Udaan raises a hand to toast terror he raises uncomfortable questions on child abuse and its parameters within the Great Indian Middleclass Family. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anupama, the disgruntled father Tarun Bose would not look at his traumatized daughter Sharmila Tagore because he lost his beloved wife during child birth.

In Udaan, the father holds the son culpable for crimes that we can only decode in the detailed episodes showing the son's rebellious streak. If God lies in the details, so does the devil.

The  rich in  this Argentinian  trigger-happy drama called Recurrence (a.k.a.Pipa) are so messed up, watching them party is like a barbarians’ ball. There are many violent relationships in the plot, crisscrossing through characters  that are scarred scared or both..

I sat through Netflix’s Recurrence, the third in the trilogy of films directed by Alejandro Montiel, based on the law-enforcement drama of Pipa Pelari(Luisiana Lopilato), who, it seems, has a violent past and a present tense…very very tense.

The town of  La Quebrada, where she now lives with her  young son Tobias, is run by the corrupt and violent Carrera family, who are a law unto themselves: think feudal, think Nishant, think Amrish Puri.

Everything in the town is controlled by the Carerras  who are portrayed as debauched decadent and devilish. They have usurped the townfolks’ lands and are happy to just party and pass out, until an ambitious waitress at the party is murdered by one of the rick bratty kids.

Pipa must find out the truth even if it means losing her sleep. The  rest  of the film tries to balance a clumsy whodunit with a comment on social inequality fueled by a corrupt establishment. Even though the action is  frantic, there is   very little in Recurrence (or Pipa as it is known in some parts of the world) to hold our attention.

The plot is pulpier than the old Jacqueline Susann novels. The sexy interludes, for instance, a disinctly incestuous relationship between two siblings in a rich family, are strangely sterile and prudish. The film wants to pander to the  family audience, hence the language and visuals are cleaned out.

But the stench of puerility refuses to go away. There are way too many loose ends in the plot—for example, why does the waitress at the party have to die?—for us to keep looking at the action which is by no means of The Gray Man standards.

Recurrence takes the Good Cop –Bad Cop tussle to the littoral of literalness. There is actually a Good Cop and a Bad Cop. The good on is a local native, who has done himself proud by  getting out of his community’s poverty. The Bad Cop, very badly acted I may add, just snarls and grits his teeth and kills anyone who comes in the way.

There is a young kid  running around in the blizzard of bullets, shooting down people whom he barely knows to be good or bad. He is the  symbol of  the chaos that this  film embraces as a gateway to a gore fest where family secrets  tumble out at a pace that is hard to keep up with. Not even worth trying.

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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