Menstruation is not an illness and access to menstrual hygiene is a must for every woman — the message in Phullu is laudatory indeed. But such is the piety and virtue with which it is dealt that the art and craft of filmmaking is entirely sacrificed.
The film starts off promisingly, setting up the real and rustic rural scenario rather well. The dirt, grime and unwashed faces — it's as unvarnished as it can get. You also get quite pleasantly taken in by the ease with which village women are shown throwing sexual innuendos. But 15 minutes into the film, with all the needless songs in the background, one begins to wonder at the aimless, drifting narrative. It gets way more tedious than even a plodding Films Division documentary of yore. Where is it going? When will it come to the point?
The point is that the village bumpkin Phullu (Sharib Hashmi), dismissed by people as mauga (effeminate), is always ready to help the women of his village and keeps going to the city to do their chores. When he is informed about how his wife, sister and other women use rags and husks during their periods, often contracting infection, he goes on a mission to learn how to make cheap sanitary napkins for them — two for 50 paise.
- Director: Abhishek Saxena
- Cast: Sharib Hashmi, Jyoti Sethi, Nutan Surya
- Storyline: A village bumpkin goes on a mission to make cheap sanitary napkins for rural women
While Phullu is concerned about female hygiene none of the village's women are shown supporting him, save his wife. His mother and sister are particularly loud and grating. But what is most hard to swallow is the fact that while Phullu is so high-minded and dripping with nobility when it comes to women at large, he hardly has any empathy for his own pregnant, visibly-ailing wife. There is just a half-hearted effort to take her to the hospital, eventually leaving her at the mercy of the local midwife. The ostensibly pro-woman stance of the film then gets highly warped and problematic — at the cost of dealing with one problem you are perpetuating another. No wonder the moralistic dialogue soon begins to sound hollow — Jo auraton ka dard nahin samjhta, Bhagwan use mard nahin samjhta (The one who disregards the pain of a woman isn't considered a man by God).
The film is obviously inspired by the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham who, despite his limited means, built a social entrepreneurship model for making affordable sanitary napkins for poor women. Amit Virmani's documentary, Menstrual Man , captures him as a fascinating character — his self-deprecatory humour, his quirky research methodology that made his wife and mother think of him as some sort of a pervert — he used an artificial uterus, football for bladder and goat blood and then tied a pad around himself to test its efficacy. Virmani made the documentary a compelling watch. All that Phullu manages to elicit are yawns.
