{"id":1036,"date":"2025-01-09T13:31:20","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T18:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/?p=1036"},"modified":"2025-01-09T13:32:26","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T18:32:26","slug":"santosh-dir-sandhya-suri-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/2025\/01\/09\/santosh-dir-sandhya-suri-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Santosh (dir. Sandhya Suri, 2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was just thinking last week about how many police procedural films I\u2019d seen recently.  They range from the very over-the-top masala films where a policeman is seen to be above the law, larger than life and meting out a kind of extra-judicial justice, something writer Jinoy Jose P. <\/a> called \u201cmuscular justice\u201d, a kind of justice that \u201cbypasses those supposedly tiresome democratic niceties like due process and constitutional rights.\u201d  Sometimes they are about well-meaning, honest policemen trying to carry out the best investigation they can in order to bring a culprit before the justice system.  But what they all have in common is that the person doing the investigating is a man.  A policeman.  Sometimes female officers exist, but they\u2019re often in the background, or, at best perhaps, assisting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what makes Sandhya Suri\u2019s 2024 film Santosh<\/strong> stand out is that it places the attention squarely on a female police officer, the young widow Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami).  Santosh becomes a police officer after the death of her husband, a constable killed during a riot.  Santosh is offered her husband\u2019s job under an Indian social security scheme called Compassionate Appointment, under which a dependent family member may be appointed to the position held by a family member who dies while in service.  Santosh jumps at the opportunity, not surprising since her in-laws want to wash their hands of her, and her family isn\u2019t keen to take her back, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early on, Santosh is thrown into the investigation of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Dalit girl.  We get our first hints at a system that is stacked against certain populations, in this case the lower caste Dalit community.  Santosh first hears about the case when the father of the missing girl (later found dead) goes to a neighbourhood cobbler to get help.  Santosh brings the father to the police station, not realizing that this system of letting the cobbler be the first line for these kinds of complaints is actively encouraged by her superiors at the station. Extra-judicial justice of a different kind, and much less effective when there\u2019s no vigilante policeman involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, Santosh<\/strong> is ostensibly a police procedural, and when Santosh\u2019s male superior at the station is transferred after some bad publicity, senior officer Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) is brought in to take charge of the investigation, and Santosh becomes her assistant and mentee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many police procedural films in India, there\u2019s this element of the police being all powerful and above the laws they\u2019re supposed to uphold, taking bribes, meting out cruelty (especially to marginalized characters like the Dalit and Muslim characters in the film).  I\u2019d call them incompetent, but it\u2019s beyond that.  These men (and they are, mostly, men) are more interested in their place in the power structure, and exerting that power over others, rather than taking any real interest in solving crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, Santosh stands in for us, the audience, as an observer of all of this:  of the incompetence, of the willing subversion of laws, of either ignoring the pleas of the Dalit and Muslim communities, or targeting them, even without any basis for doing so.  But the system gradually pulls her in \u2013 first at the side of \u201cSenior Madam\u201d, taking on new responsibilities for investigating the rape and murder of the Dalit teenager, but also gradually becoming part of the system that ignores evidence or lines of investigation to pursue one convenient narrative, and eventually joining in on the torture inflicted on the man who becomes the main suspect in the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The death of this suspect places Santosh at a crossroads \u2013 she has become a police officer by the accident of her husband\u2019s death and the system of Compassionate Appointments.  Through the investigation, she becomes both complicit in the prejudices, the violence, the incompetence, and the inhumanity of a system meant to protect the very people it is harming.  When she comes to the realization that their suspect had nothing to do with the girl\u2019s death, she confronts her senior, only to be told that there are two types of untouchables:  the ones that no one wants to touch, and the ones that cannot be touched, that is, people in positions of power who will never answer for their crimes.  For Senior Madam, there is nothing that can be done to change this:  the police are just servants in this system.  Santosh might know the truth about what happened, but there is no good outcome for sharing that truth, and it\u2019s better to let people feel that justice, however ham-fisted, has been done.  And also that justice often has little to do with truth or fairness.  Santosh might feel she knows the truth about what happened, but there are other hard truths that she must face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suri\u2019s film, with Shahana Goswami at its core as an excellent observer, is tense and heart-breaking.  It\u2019s also occasionally very hard to watch, particularly the scenes involving the torture of the suspect, in which Santosh becomes an active participant, stepping out of her role as silent observer for the first time.  For me, though, it\u2019s Sunita Rajwar as Santosh\u2019s senior, Geeta Sharma, who is one of the most compelling characters in the film.  Sharma is charismatic and intelligent.  She takes pride in having been the person to establish the first women-only police help desks.  But it\u2019s very evident that to get to the position she holds, she\u2019s had to play the man\u2019s game \u2013 when she first arrives, and the officers are eating dinner, the female police officers are at a table by themselves, but Senior Madam holds fort with the male officers.  She takes Santosh on as a mentee, but some of the ways she interacts with Santosh are just as inappropriate as if a male officer did the same things:  a pat on the shoulder becomes a caress on the ear.  A gift of a gold nose stud which Senior Madam gently puts in Santosh\u2019s nose.  It\u2019s a very unsettling and yet deliberate way to show that women only get ahead in a man\u2019s world when they are just as corrupt as the men.   Senior Madam might talk a good line about women having to swallow humiliation, but as she tells Santosh, \u201cWe\u2019re all performing, us and the suspects too.\u201d  Who knows more about performance than the police?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Santosh<\/strong> is a complex film.\u00a0 It invites us to question the actions and words of everyone, of the police, of the accused, and even of the victims.\u00a0 In such a complicated web of deceit and corruption, how is anyone expected to get justice?\u00a0 Santosh<\/strong> shows us that even our most faithful observer of a corrupt system risks becoming complicit in the worst way.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning to Jinoy Jose P.\u2019s reflections on The Uniform Code \u2013 if most contemporary police procedurals trade \u201cthe messiness of democratic discourse for the clean certainties of vigilante justice\u201d<\/a>, Santosh <\/strong>is one of those rare and scarce cinematic voices willing to stand in the face of this and ask us, the audience, to bear witness to it all, just as Santosh Saini must bear witness to the corruption, violence, misogyny and systemic injustice of a system that is supposed to deliver justice, and which instead ends up subverting it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was just thinking last week about how many police procedural films I\u2019d seen recently.  They range from the very over-the-top masala films where a policeman is seen to be above the law, larger than life and meting out a kind of extra-judicial justice, something writer Jinoy Jose P. called…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingSantosh (dir. Sandhya Suri, 2024)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[729],"tags":[836,833,832,834,835],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festival-films","tag-cannes","tag-sandhya-suri","tag-santosh","tag-shahana-goswami","tag-sunita-jajwar","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions\/1041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}