There are many stories that lie hidden in the depressing newspaper headlines. The art is in giving them a compelling, emotional shape on screen. Madhureeta Anand succeeds but marginally so in Kajarya .
The film is beautifully shot and has a sinister tone running uniformly across the film. Madhureeta also makes good use of the largely unknown actors. The film itself pits two women from two distinct social strata against each other. Kajarya (Meenu Hooda) personifies Kali for the residents of an orthodox Haryana village and on the other hand you have city girl Meera (Ridhima Sud), a journalist, who is only concerned about getting her story, in this case about female foeticide and infanticide. The character of the city girl comes much more layered than the heavy-handed portrayal of the village witch Kajarya. Oddly, it’s Meera’s ambition, her short sightedness and ignorance and gullibility that are more interesting than Kajarya’s misery.
Madhureeta is well-meaning, earnest and sincere in the cause she takes up, How the women are brutalised in a patriarchal set up and turn into agents of brutality themselves. And how those who are actually complicit in crimes against women end up going ssscot free. But the film turns out too neat, tidy structurally and emotionally austere. Even the comparison and contrast on the gender issues in the rural vs urban scenarios are too orderly and precisely arranged. The mess of an issue that it is, it doesn’t wrench you the way you would have wanted it to nor do the protagonists reach out and touch you deeply. It’s a film that should have involved one but left one feeling curiously distant. Perhaps because what the film portrays doesn’t quite go beyond the newspaper headlines, there are no new insights, perspectives to enlighten, added to what you already know nor is there anything to jolt you. Perhaps we have become too inured. Or may be the film needed to be more intense than it has turned out.
Kajarya
Director: Madhureeta Anand
Starring: Meenu Hooda, Ridhima Sud, Kuldeep Ruhil, Shashi Bhushan
