Even if you were to give the title the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe the makers want to make Mardaani gender-irrelevant, the very notion or suggestion that courage is a manly virtue is problematic, given the ambition of this thriller themed around women’s empowerment. Or maybe the makers want us to believe that being a man is about being unemotional and the clash here is between the unemotional hunters and the emotional hunters. While the cold villain hunts girls for his trade, the emotional heroine is in hunt of the villain who sellsthe girls.
Though it plays out like a darker version of Taken and borrows the backdrop from Nagesh Kukunoor’s Lakshmi or Abhinav Shiv Tiwari’s Oass , there’s no denying that this is probably the one that will reach most people around the country while the more sensitive art house films on the subject tour festivals.
Can you forgive a film for exploiting an issue in order to reach a bigger audience? Let’s face it, all filmmakers dealing with this issue — whether they are art house or commercial — are already exploiting the issue by mining it for emotional appeal. Our sensibility bias may lead us to believe that a louder form of cinema is bad and a realistic form is good, though in reality, the realistic form unleashes more horrors to make us feel for the characters and show us the living hell the girls have been enslaved by.
Which is why Mardaani , despite its choices of the fundamentally flawed title and the loud Bollywood sensibility is probably the noblest of the films made on the issue. Because for a mainstream Bollywood film, Mardaani shows more restraint than the voyeuristic art house films made on the issue. And it is made for the masses without any pretensions or festival ambitions.
Pradeep Sarkar’s film (written by Gopi Puthran) assumes you already know how horrible this world is (it establishes it early enough in the film when the villains, devoid of any histrionics, make teens strip to categorise them on the basis of the market) and gets on with the story of the chase at a fairly fast pace.
Rani Mukerji’s presence and attitude gives this dark film some hope. We know at some level that this heroine will make everything okay.
The villain too isn’t some stereotypical, uncouth pimp. He’s a sophisticated, English-speaking, second-generation businessman with an eye on the global market. He’s cold, smart, cunning and goes about his business unemotionally. Debutant Tahir Bhasin nails the part. And so do many of the new faces in the film.
These minor twists to the clichés and the restraint in dwelling on the suffering make the predictable Mardaani reasonably engaging. And thankfully, it doesn’t generalise about the evil in all men, despite the silly title.
If you wouldn’t mind shelling out money for the likes of Singham , you shouldn’t even think twice.
As cheesy as the ending is, you will find yourself cheering.
