Film festivals can be sanctuaries; to escape from the rough and tumble of life into the warm comfort and wide-eyed wonderment of many-splendoured movies. This year they have also been arenas of gender politics, be it the 82 women on the red carpet and Asia Argento’s furious speech against Harvey Weinstein at Cannes, or the Share Her Journey march at Toronto.
Last week, as close friends, acquaintances and strangers started naming and shaming sexual predators — many of whom have been professional contacts, friends and (now fallen) idols — I found myself cut off from social media, closeted in the quaint Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival (PYIFF).
Often, all it takes is one film to get you back to reality. Watching Ivan Ayr’s Soni at ‘A Spring In The Small Town’ theatre, minutes before rushing to Mumbai, was like staring back into the mirror reflecting a far from flattering image. It cut too close to the bone in its own quiet, discreet, unobtrusive yet unflinching way. With two women cops on a decoy operation, the film is all about the casual sexism, everyday harassment and deep-rooted misogyny enveloping and smothering us. An on-screen narrative running unwittingly but intimately parallel to the one playing for real. It’s a tangled and tortuous web of patriarchy on display, internalised by both men and women. There is the normalising of male entitlement by even educated, liberal women.
The onus to fob off male advances rests on us — like putting sindoor to appear married, wearing ‘pant shirt’ on a date, or quietly weeping rather than retorting to cruel jokes in classroom, or laughing away the audacity of a man calling the control room to ask for a woman cop’s number. And then the confession of not liking the sight of a stalker being flogged by cops, despite his trespasses.
Does the conditioning into emotionalism get the better of women?
Matter of fact
Ayr doesn’t make a hue and cry about it, doesn’t resort to high drama or manipulative twists and turns. It’s a slice of life portrayal of incipient and accepted patriarchal perversions.
In the backdrop — on the radio and TV and walkie-talkies — is the aftermath of the Nirbhaya rape case of 2012. There is talk of CCTV cameras, of special buses and taxis for women. Of segregating women for their security. There is also an odd instance of ‘collateral damage’ and opportunism, but with men themselves as agent provocateurs, using women for their selfish ends. In the midst of it is the sorority of women — the two cops, the niece of one.
And there is bottled-up frustration, pent-up rage in women that forgets protocol, and bursts out (often recklessly) with an unforeseen ferocity.
When class dynamics and power imbalances render even supposedly empowered sections incapacitated, how can law be enforced? Even women cops are susceptible to everyday crimes; they may have the power to curb the menace but could themselves be targets.
Even in the chase for justice, to put drug offenders behind bars, they may end up facing disciplinary action, suspensions and transfers. It’s a brutal hierarchy of the privileged and the entitled hitting back, visible even in the recent turn of events in the #MeToo #TimesUp movement.
Watching Soni is like being in a dystopia for women where their lives are considered (with a nod to Amrita Pritam’s autobiography) as inconsequential as a raseedi ticket (revenue stamp). Where do women go from here?
As we go to press, Soni has won the Roberto Rossellini best film award in the Crouching Tiger section of PYIFF and it could well be one, if not the most, relevant film you will see this year at the 20th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival with Star.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
