Friday, July 7, 2017

REVIEW 504: MOM


Release date:
July 7, 2017
Director:
Ravi Udyawar
Cast:



Language:
Sridevi, Sajal Ali, Adnan Siddiqui, Akshaye Khanna, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Abhimanyu Singh, Vikas Verma, Adarsh Gourav Bhagvatula, Pitobash Tripathy
Hindi


How could you get the politics of your film almost perfect in the first half, then descend into eternal Bollywood clichés about rape and maaaaaaa in the second? How could you go from low-key to high-pitched within the span of a single narrative? How could you assemble some of the most talented screen performers ever seen together in a film, then limit many of them with one-dimensional characterisation?

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Debutant director Ravi Udyawar’s Mom revolves around a mother whose teenaged daughter is sexually assaulted in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

Sridevi plays the central character, Devki Sabarwal. She is not your typical old-time-Bollywood Nirupa Roy kind of perennially weeping madre who was restricted to keeping house, longing for a bahu and shouting at God for being a patthar ki murti unmoved by her adoring son’s hardships. Devki is a senior school biology teacher, and is struggling to gain the affections of her husband’s first child Arya. Her mild demeanour camouflages a tough-as-nails personality though. That hidden Durga goes on a rampage – quiet at first – when Arya’s torn and ravaged body is found one day in a ditch, and the girl is let down by the judiciary.

You probably know this much already if you have been following the film’s publicity and have read its Wikipedia page. What you do not know yet is that the pre-interval portion of Mom goes beyond the expected, the initial treatment of the mother-daughter relationship is unconventional, and the long-drawn-out scene of gangrape is chilling yet sensitively done what unfolds before our eyes is designed to horrify, yet we are not shown a single shot of what actually happens to Arya, which is a relief considering how Bollywood of an earlier era often used rape to titillate audiences rather than evoke empathy for the abused.

In the opening half of Mom, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably and moved to the point of speechlessness. I remember quickly pretending to check my phone during the interval for fear that a colleague at the press preview might strike up a conversation with me and realise I had lost my voice.

Understatement is the hallmark of Mom up to this point, and the gender politics is just so. But for a passing comment by Devki, which is atypical of this seemingly liberal woman, the writing does not stereotype women or sexual violence until then. (Credits: story by Ravi Udyawar, Girish Kohli and Kona Venkat, screenplay and dialogue by Girish Kohli.)

Perhaps that comment should have given us a hint of what was to come though. When Devki goes to a police station to report a missing daughter, cops brush aside her fear, with one going to the extent of saying that the girl has most likely taken off with her boyfriend since it is Valentine’s night. You may have come across many such girls but my daughter is not that type, Devki retorts. That type? Really? 

If those words had come from a character who had already been established as a conservative by the screenplay, it would have made sense, but since Devki is portrayed as an open-minded person, this sounded more like the writers unwittingly betraying their inner conservatism.

Still, that remark was overshadowed by the poignance of the film up to that moment.

Sadly, the post-interval portion of Mom leaves behind normal human beings with normal reactions to crimes against themselves and their loved ones, and gives way to cinematic clichés. Devki becomes an avenging angel in the mould of Dimple Kapadia in 1988’s Zakhmi Aurat, and Mom begins its downhill slide.

This is why last year’s Pink was so unusual – because for the most part, it showed us how ordinary people react to sexual violence in particular and injustices in general, despite the frustrations of inhabiting an unjust world.

Revenge sprees are less challenging to write though than nuanced normality. They also serve to satisfy the bloodlust of the audience, which is why commercial cinema has opted for them so often down the decades. If it was not a zakhmi aurat (wounded woman) it was a brother out to avenge the loss of his ghar ki izzat (family honour). In A Wednesday (2008), director Neeraj Pandey extended this populism to mob justice in terror cases, with a Common Man taking the law into his own hands to punish aatankvaadis who he feels are being needlessly given fair trials in the Indian system. In Mom the argument is articulated thus: “Galat aur bahut galat mein se chun-na ho toh aap kya chunenge?” (If you have to choose between what is wrong and what is very wrong, what would you choose?)

To be fair to Bollywood, it is not the only Indian film industry guilty of this charge. The Malayalam film industry a.k.a. Mollywood, for instance, has in recent years given us Puthiya Niyamam (2016) and 22 Female Kottayam (2012), which too were crowd-pleasing portrayals of rape.

Even for those who do not care about realism and reality, Mom is problematic for its lazy writing in the second half where loose ends are left hanging so openly that an intelligent person might spot them from a mile away. A criminal leaves behind a mega clue at a crime scene, but casually outwits a supposedly smart cop who gets his hands on it and who, at that point, is not sympathetic to her cause, which means he cannot be assumed to have deliberately let it go. Two people who show considerable deftness in committing three crimes, suddenly become really stupid with their fourth potential victim. And those same accomplices vow to hide their association from the world, yet subsequently provide elephant-sized evidence of it to the police.

So yes, Sridevi’s acting is wonderful; the actors playing her supportive husband Anand (Adnan Siddiqui) and Arya (Sajal Ali) have immensely likeable personalities; the use of A.R. Rahman’s music in the first half is effective; the always amazing Anay Goswami’s cinematography summons up stunning grandeur and intimacy by turns, depending on the requirement of the situation; and a particular mention must be made of the brilliant sound design by Nihar Ranjan Samal during the assault on Arya; but none of that can compensate for the post-interval increase in the film’s volume, the limited use of a talented actor like Akshaye Khanna (as the policeman Mathew Francis), the over-use of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s histrionics for the character of the detective Dayashankar Kapoor a.k.a. DK, the re-stressing of gender stereotypes through a transgender character in the film, the loopholes and, above all, the cliched portrayal of the response to sexual assault. 

As if all this is not bad enough, Mom’s handling of the judicial process too lacks clarity and is misleading to viewers who do not know the nitty-gritty of India’s laws governing rape. I hope a lawyer will review this film in the coming days.

Ultimately then, despite its pretensions to non-conformism, Mom does nothing more than aim at easy applause. That goal is best illustrated by its predictable, horribly maudlin ending about maaaaaaaaaa.

Perhaps it was foolish to expect anything better from a film in which one character says, “Bhagwan har jagah nahin hota, DKji (God is not everywhere),” to which DKji a.k.a. Dayashankar Kapoor replies, “Isiliye toh usne maa banaayi hai (yes, that is why he made mothers).” If you want to be Manmohan Desai or Yash Chopra, why not go all out and not pretend?

The emotional pull of the first half and Sridevi’s acting excellence notwithstanding, Mom in many ways is as dangerous as the loud, raucous, not-even-pretending-to-be-progressive-about-women commercial Bollywood of the 1970s and ’80s.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):
UA
Running time:
147 minutes 43 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:




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