{"id":450,"date":"2021-05-27T18:14:27","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T22:14:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/?p=450"},"modified":"2021-05-27T18:14:27","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T22:14:27","slug":"mardaani-dir-pradeep-sarkar-2104","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/2021\/05\/27\/mardaani-dir-pradeep-sarkar-2104\/","title":{"rendered":"Mardaani (dir. Pradeep Sarkar, 2104)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on August 25, 2014<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a moment, sitting in the theatre watching Mardaani<\/strong>, when I knew that I was going to be swimming upstream against opinion in my view of the film.  I\u2019ve walked out of precisely one film in my long film-watching life, and quite honestly, if it hadn\u2019t been for three things, I might well have walked out of Mardaani<\/strong> as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, we\u2019d driven a long way to this theatre, and I wasn\u2019t alone.  If I walked out, I would have had to leave Mr. Totally Filmi behind, and since he was the one with the car keys, I figured I should just sit it out (aside:  Mr. T.F. liked the film, and I think he was a little surprised at my reaction to it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, the themes the film deals with \u2013 specifically the issue of the human sex trafficking trade, but also the idea hinted at in the title, that \u201cmanliness: what does it mean to be manly, not only for the women in this film, but for the men themselves?  I have very little respect for men who think it\u2019s \u201cmanly\u201d to bed little girls, or for men who think it\u2019s quite all right to kidnap them and force them into those beds.  I\u2019m also quite sure that I don\u2019t think female empowerment has much to do with being \u201cmanly\u201d \u2013 behaving like men (to be fair, I saw that clip where Rani explained the title as translating more to \u201cwarriorlike\u201d, and I won\u2019t disagree that sometimes women need to learn to stand up for themselves and take care of themselves, if that\u2019s how we\u2019re going to define \u201cwarriorlike\u201d).  But those are interesting ideas to think about, and I wanted to see how they played out in the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirdly, Rani Mukherjee.  I have to say, the key thing that kept me in my seat was Rani Mukeherjee\u2019s fine, fine performance.  Rani truly gets into the skin of her character, Shivani Shivaji Roy.  Roy is a sub-inspector with the crime branch in Mumbai.  She\u2019s also a wife and a surrogate mother to both her niece, and to Pyaari, an adolescent whom she has rescued from the railway station and on whom she keeps a watchful eye.  When Pyaari goes missing, Shivani begins to investigate her disappearance, and what she finds is the tip of a very deep iceberg of trade in young girls.  When Shivani is contacted by Karan Rastogi (AKA \u201cWalt\u201d, in a hat tip to the very popular television series Breaking Bad<\/strong>), his intention is to offer her a bribe to get her to drop the investigation.  He offers her a penthouse apartment.  She refuses, asking him how she\u2019ll get to it when the elevator is, inevitably, out of service.  What Shivani demands is the return of Pyaari.  When Karan refuses \u2013 Pyaari has seen too much of his operation, making her a threat to it \u2013 Shivani lets him know that she plans to hunt him down and take Pyaari back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


There is, actually, a lot \u2013 quite a lot — that I like about Mardaani<\/strong>.  I love Shivani Shivaji Roy \u2013 love that she\u2019s a tough cop, that she\u2019s respected by the other cops she works with.  She\u2019s smart, she\u2019s knowledgeable (the scene where she delivers a tight slap for every infraction she cites serves cleverly to underline this).  She\u2019s also a typical working woman, bringing home take-away when she\u2019s arriving home too late to cook, combing her niece\u2019s hair before setting off to work \u2013 thankfully, Mardaani<\/strong> gives us a central female character who feels real, and Rani Mukherjee takes her and makes us want to cheer for her at every step of the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 
There are a lot of smartly written scenes and clever dialogues, as well as a few really fine supporting performances.  I love Shivani\u2019s coworkers and her relationship with them \u2013 they treat her as an equal, as evidenced by the banter they share as well as their well orchestrated work relationship.  Shivani is a tough, honest cop, but she also knows that some methods work better than others at getting information.  One of the film\u2019s fine moments involves her trying to get information out of Rehman, who she and her team recently busted.  He knows she\u2019s trying to bribe information out of him by offering up some biryani.  She knows he knows it.  He offers her what she needs, not because of that bribe, but only because, as he tells her, of the children involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


So it\u2019s an enormous frustration for me that a film that can get these kinds of details right \u2013 that has characters that step beyond a stereotype, that has scenes and dialogues so deftly and delicately written \u2013 can also get so much wrong.  There are just as many performances here that strike a wrong note as those that soar.  Shivani\u2019s husband is nothing more than a blip in the film \u2013 frankly, it felt as if he was only there as a kind of convenient vehicle for a bit of payback\/warning for Shivani when she gets too close to Karan\u2019s operation (irony:  the husband is treated just like a heroine in a typical hero-centred film might be).  Karan himself is kind of an interesting character, and played beautifully and with restraint by relative newcomer Tahir Bhasin.  But most of the villains in this film, those involved in the illegal drug and sex trades, well, they\u2019re stereotypes and cyphers, too.  I suspect, too, that for me, Mardaani<\/strong> suffered in comparison to the 2013 Malayalam language film Thira<\/strong>.  Directed by Vineeth Srineevasan, Thira<\/strong> explored a similar subject matter in a similar style, but did so with much greater delicatesse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The scene that had me contemplating walking out of the film is also the scene that made me feel incredibly physically ill \u2013 it\u2019s the rape of Pyaari by the client who purchases her.  This came on the heels of several scenes in which Pyaari and the other girls who have been kidnapped are forceably stripped, foreceably showered, and forced to remove the thin blankets they\u2019ve been given so that they may be \u201csorted\u201d into appropriate bits of the trade, some as higher end prostitutes, some merely as mules for the drug trade.  I understand the need to create some kind of response in the audience, that these are issues that are difficult to think about, difficult to face.  But they have to be faced if anything is to be done about this horrible, horrible trade in young girls.  There is, however, a line between forcing the audience to face these horrors and contemplate them with an eye to making them think about the issues, and maybe act on that when they leave the theatre; there is a line between that and a kind of voyeurism, and I think, for me, that Mardaani<\/strong> crossed that line at some point.  Maybe it was one too many scenes of girls being degraded; maybe it was the soft, artful lighting used to imply delicacy in dealing with Pyaari\u2019s rape.  It\u2019s one of those terrible conundrums, too \u2013 how do you know when the line between decency and voyeurism has been crossed?  How do you even know where it is?  Possibly it\u2019s different for every viewer, but for me, it was just too much, and I was never able to enjoy what was truly good in this film after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The film is at its best when it focusses on the cat and mouse game happening between Shivani and Karan, but it also manages to dissipate much of the tension that game should generate.  And in the film\u2019s final scenes \u2013 when I suppose the appropriate response would have been to cheer for Shivani and the girls as they apply a balm of vigilante justice to make up for the injustice dealt to them \u2013 well, mostly I was just glad it was over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


And those final scenes bring me back to the film\u2019s title \u2013 what does it mean to be \u201cmanly\u201d \u2013 or even, what does it mean to be warriorlike, if I go with the translation preferred by the film\u2019s makers?  Is being empowered, for a woman, merely to behave just like a man?  To behave just as badly as men, in the case of the woman who works \u201ctaking care\u201d of the girls, or in the case of Karan\u2019s mother?  Is this how we want to right wrongs, by taking justice into our own hands and beating the crap out of those who treat us unjustly? It\u2019s not how I view empowerment.  And it\u2019s not how I view justice \u2013 I\u2019d prefer to see us work towards fixing systems that allow this kind of criminal activity to go unpunished or to be ignored; systems that treat victims as if they have something to be ashamed of.  And I\u2019d even take an imperfect system over the kind of popular vigilantism suggested by Shivani in the film\u2019s climax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


But please, whatever happens \u2013 give me another film with a role like this one for Rani Mukerjee.  Give me Shivani Shivaji Roy in an investigation worthy of her talents. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on August 25, 2014 There was a moment, sitting in the theatre watching Mardaani, when I knew that I was going to be swimming upstream against opinion in my view of the film.  I\u2019ve walked out of precisely one film in my long film-watching…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingMardaani (dir. Pradeep Sarkar, 2104)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[289],"tags":[522,524,523,525],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hindi-movies","tag-mardaani","tag-pradeep-sarkar","tag-rani-mukherjee","tag-tahir-bhasin","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","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=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}