But why does an Alia need to be a Bachchan? Particularly when the film doesn’t understand that what lay at the heart of his strength was a hurt that a whole country could identify with.
Let me say at the outset: No, I did not like Jigra. The calculated acting, the clunky storyline, the much-too-clever references, the hamming jailor, the constant use of a father’s suicide in front of his young children as almost a scene filler, were just one part of it. What was most disturbing about this film — despite its very likable actor, Alia Bhatt — was how it dispensed with morality as an inconvenient detail in the path of relentless revenge. And, all in the cause of “a woman-centric film” — as is being drilled into anyone who dares question it.
Just because Alia wields a gun, wears a flak jacket and drives headlong into a highly guarded prison, and doesn’t seem to care about her looks (while looking flawless), are women supposed to fall in line? Should we not care that, along the way, she largely remorselessly sends a good person to his death and callously uses a “revolution” that a desperate populace has been waging against a dictatorial regime?
As Alia’s Satya (short for Satyabhama, a Hindu goddess) walks away with her beloved brother, she is walking away from a mayhem triggered by her, which in the real world would provoke a government crackdown lasting years.
What are we if we don’t question this?
I know, I know we are not supposed to “overthink” a Bollywood film, especially get into awkward things like “revolutions”. But isn’t this supposed to be more than any other Bollywood film? A balancing of scales, no less, for women stars in the notoriously skewed film industry?
And what is its message? When life gives you lemons, be a Bachchan.
But why does an Alia need to be a Bachchan? Particularly when the film doesn’t understand that what lay at the heart of his strength was a hurt that a whole country could identify with. Or, that what dealt Bachchan the star the strongest blow in his celluloid career was not an enemy bullet, but a maa’s rejection of him, in her decision to choose right over might.
All we have around us is a world where might is right, drones rain down on sticks, bulldozers crush the weak, the loudest are the strongest. The most daring act now is to be a majority of one.
Satya’s dare requires Rs 2 crore in the bank and a private jet.
No, even if it is a woman firing up a place, it doesn’t make her the bravest person in a fight. The one who stands in the path of a tank and places a flower in its barrel is still mostly it. Do we really need more of the first, when there are so few of the latter?
Don’t thrust this testosterone-fuelled version of bravery, of killing, maiming, fighting and bulldozing everything along the way upon us.
You want to give me a woman-centric film? How about Satya using the steel she has developed over the years, of which she shows plenty before being thrown into a killing spree — just like women before her have developed in households, needing to be different people to different members — to forge a new way?
You want to give me a woman-centric film? How about not copying a Bachchan template and developing an Alia one, where she rules a brothel, and all the violence that comes with it, her way, wearing high heels, a nose stud, red lips, dark glasses and a lot of smarts? That Alia-starrer, Gangubai Kathiawadi, wasn’t without its blemishes, the primary one being that it didn’t want its heroine with any. But it was still a woman in whose fight we could see shades of ourselves.
You want to give me a woman-centric film? Don’t give me another angry young man.
Give me the wrinkled Gisele Pelicot, felling her mass rapists in a French court, demolishing the silence around sexual abuse, by saying simply: “Shame must change sides.”
So must heroism.
National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
