A little over a year after the #MeToo movement sparked a revolution, filmmaker Ruchi Narain feels liberated. The 44-year-old firmly believes the phenomenon has encouraged women to talk about things — among themselves and on public platforms — like they never did before. “Forget about a serious incident like assault, I’m talking about simple day-to-day stuff, casual sexism which everyone has to deal with,” says the director with extreme deliberation. Up until recently, micro-aggressions have been largely tolerated, but there’s a change now that cannot be overlooked. “The reason why people haven’t spoken up for years is because they want to get on with their ambitions,” says Narain. “[Women] are here because we want to work, we want to express and create. We are not here to do any activism.”
Questions and answers
The director and screenwriter is sitting alongside actor Kiara Advani, talking to The Hindu , about the duo’s upcoming Netflix film Guilty and its position in a post-#MeToo society. Based in a Delhi University milieu, the whodunnit focuses on the perspective of a woman (played by Advani) whose boyfriend is accused of sexual assault.
Likening the hotheadedness of her character to Shahid Kapur’s Kabir Singh (who she starred alongside), Advani prepped for her role by meeting assault survivors. In Guilty , her character Nanki is accused of intimidating the alleged victim, an uncomfortable position in a time when women are expected to stand up for each other. Though the actor faithfully played out Nanki, she’s aware of the politics and complications surrounding the movement, including the magnitude of false accusations. “Of course, we all want justice, but I think there are deeper issues that need to be tackled,” says the 27-year-old actor talking about the perils of a patriarchal society. “It is good that the conversation started, but where is it leading to? I wish I had these answers.”
Truth foretold
Narain, who echoes the sentiment, intuitively predicted the public discourse that sexual misconduct would have in the future. Guilty has been the culmination of that foretelling. “I’d told Karan [Johar] I want to write a film about rape seven years ago,” says Narain adding that it was evident to her that there would be a clash between women who have been brought up to be empowered and the current state of society which hasn’t progressed as fast. In the time since, horrific gendered crimes brought problems surrounding women’s safety to the forefront. The #MeToo movement, then becomes an ongoing catalyst in taking the discourse further. “As a woman with so many ambitions, [I] was not able to get to go where I wanted to because of a kind of push back [from society],” says Narain. “I wanted to make a film which tackled the complexities and the confusions not just of women but also men who are part of the same society.”
As our chat winds to an end, both Advani and Narain stress that Guilty will elicit discomfort in its audience, both during and after its viewing. They might not even agree with its resolution. That’s exactly what the director wants so that the important discourse can continue, in spite of the embers of the movement cooling. But before we part, it’s Advani who emphasises, “I feel like women have each others backs now, and we’ve come so far, but we still have a long way to go.”
Guilty is streaming on Netflix
