Walking into the newly opened neighbourhood movie screen with my 19-year-old boy, little did I expect that three hours later it would turn out to be an evening of myriad emotions and feelings. I had watched the trailer, which hinted at a possible crime thriller. The lead actor had climbed into my rather exclusive list of favourites. And, it was a movie night with the homefor-a-week-on-a-term-break son, one of life’s pleasures!
As the movie shifted from a setting in Dubai to the picturesque greenery of the Kerala hills and introduced the central theme, I was hooked. The first half was brilliant; it captured the stalking and the male gazes on a woman, with astounding realism.
I was instantly transported to the early 1990s when as a college student in small-town Kottayam, life for me and my friends every single day was about how to stick as close together as possible — physically and emotionally — in order to overcome the grating, roving eyes, the verbal onslaughts and the resulting repugnance. We struggled with it together, united in abhorrence and cluelessness. Most of the time our only recourse was feigning to ignore it, while seething inwardly. The land which nature adorned benevolently, seemed full of humans most ugly. It led my best friend to proclaim she could not wait to leave the State and would never spend her adult life there. Years later, she has done exactly that.
The movie was a jolt — I was dazed by how the fundamental outlook towards women seemed to have remained exactly where it was more than two decades ago, and elated by a gutsy Malayalam movie that portrayed this with honesty. I could almost feel my skin crawl in a familiar sensation: such was the craft of the makers and the actors.
During the interval, over water, I shared a couple of snippets with my son from those days of how simple bus journeys from home to college and back could be nightmarish. I could not wait for the movie to resume. For I was heavily invested in the targeted woman and her wonderfully simple and decent husband. What an incredible character sketch of a man who respects his wife’s desires and family, shows restraint on losing his job and an unborn child, leaps up to lend a helping hand to hang up the washing, shows candour and humour at his own little limitations, and uses intellect and observation to decipher the ways of a land and people hitherto unknown to him.
I was of course rooting for the couple to overcome their odious perpetrators and could not wait to see how they would do it. And then came the second half and the solution, and a bigger dampener I have never felt in a movie. What a glorious opportunity to create an impact with the solution as realistically as with the issue, and what an opportunity heedlessly hurled away.
The violence
For the solution was banal, as trite a version as seen in endless Indian movies — one seeped in violence, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Watching the second half reduced to an otiose and hollow conclusion, not only did I feel cheated of cinematic pleasure, but more importantly I was left dejected. By taking recourse to hurling Molotov cocktails to outbrave a brazen reality, were the makers saying all hope of a meaningful solution was lost? That no matter how normal a guy was, in order to turn “protector” he needed to become a bashing super-human? Wasn’t this pseudo-male allegiance in itself at the core of the issue the movie was trying to address?
The nadir of the downward-spiralling evening was perhaps the huge cheers and whistles in the cinema at all the heroism on display. As I shook my head at my son and left the theatre deeply disgruntled, I wondered: is it perhaps a good sign that the largely male audience appreciated the bashing up of the on-screen perpetrators? Could it be that given a chance they would all produce the same adventurous actions to overcome a member of their clan when they witnessed a woman being harassed? Then this would indeed have been a movie of a lifetime!
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