Bold and the beautiful
The new crop of Marathi films is fearless in its exploration of sexual dilemmas.
Although the recent MAMI film festival came in for a lot of criticism over the management of the event, there can be no denying that it provided a magnificent platform for Marathi film-makers. On offer was an interesting array of films from first-time, as well as seasoned, directors that covered a wide variety of genres. Nevertheless, there was one perceptible query underlying all these disparate films and that was — what does it mean to be a man or a woman in present-day India?
In Renuka Shahane’s Rita, based on a novel by her mother Shanta Gokhale, the eponymous Rita, after years of selfless service to her family and her lover, decides to move away from them both and assert her financial and sexual independence.
Sachin Kundalkar’s Gandha takes a different tack to explore the issue of femininity. Presenting three short films (in the manner of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Four Women, made in 2007), he strings together the lives and aspirations of three women of different ages. The first is a light-hearted comedy, where the young heroine, achieves the rosy concatenation of a romance into an arranged marriage. This is sharply contrasted by a modern tragedy (and homage to Spanish director Pedro Almodovar) where an AIDS sufferer is abandoned by his wife. In the third short film, Kundalkar beautifully encapsulates the emotions of an educated woman whose own infertility is poignantly encircled by a profusion of symbols of fertility, whether it is the birth of a second child to her co-habiting sister-in-law or the constant rain that falls outside her window.
‘Women’s issues’ have preoccupied Marathi films for a long time now. However, as established patterns of patriarchy are put under stress by social, economic, and technological changes in India, the new challenge that arises with these transformations is how to be a ‘man’ in this new and changing world.
In Umesh Kulkarni’s Vihir, a ‘coming of age’ tale explored with great sensitivity, the sudden death of his cousin, plunges Nachiket into a search for who he is and what his life is about, before he accedes to adulthood. Interrogations on being and nothingness, on life and death, are difficult to bring to the screen, and Kulkarni’s lyrical treatment is reminiscent of Korean director, Kim Ki-Duk’s, 3 Iron (made in 2005), another contemplation on love, life, and death.
Veteran directors Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar’s Ek Cup Chya is a delightful film that is both funny and touching, about an ordinary man’s fight against the Kafkaesque workings of an indifferent, and casually cruel, bureaucracy. When bus conductor, Kashinath Sawant, wrongly receives an electricity bill for tens of thousands of rupees, his attempts to right the error draw him into a bureaucratic maze. His electricity is cut off, putting his family’s life into great hardship, in particular his son, who is studying for important school-leaving exams. As he staggers, in vain, from pillar to post, he begins to doubt his own competence to be a father, husband, and provider for his family.
But perhaps no other film addresses the issue of masculinity with as much directness as Ravi Jadhav’s Natarang. When a landowner mechanises the irrigation to his fields, Guna, a dirt-poor landless farmer decides that he and his unemployed fellow workers should chance their luck by becoming stage performers. He forms a Tamasha troupe, but with no one willing to take on the character of the ‘nachya’, the very masculine and virile Guna, transforms himself into a female impersonator.
In Jadhav’s Natarang, homosexuality, transvestism, gender-bending impersonations, and male gang rape — the latter as swift and brutal retribution when Guna inadvertently gets involved in rural politics — all investigate deep-rooted male sexual anxieties with unabashed frankness. In complete contrast, Prakash Mokashi’s ill-judged and deeply annoying Harishchandrachi Factory, takes the ‘father’ of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, and reduces him to a caricature of a well-meaning buffoon. It is unclear whether Mokashi still has a lot to learn about film-making or whether he was making a sophisticated, ironical post-modern joke — either way, the film is a disaster, making its choice as candidate for the Academy Awards (the ‘Oscars’) a very puzzling one. Whatever the failings of the organisers of the MAMI film festival, at least they had the good sense to avoid it!
All in all, while Bollywood lurches blindly from one eyewateringly extravagant project to another in search of that elusive magical formula that will make a killing at the box office, Marathi cinema, like the more responsible and mature sibling, is quietly, but confidently, showing that the way to the future for Indian cinema lies not in the loft conversions of NRIs in New York or elsewhere, but in the real hopes and anxieties of its viewing public right here.
In Renuka Shahane’s Rita, based on a novel by her mother Shanta Gokhale, the eponymous Rita, after years of selfless service to her family and her lover, decides to move away from them both and assert her financial and sexual independence.
Sachin Kundalkar’s Gandha takes a different tack to explore the issue of femininity. Presenting three short films (in the manner of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Four Women, made in 2007), he strings together the lives and aspirations of three women of different ages. The first is a light-hearted comedy, where the young heroine, achieves the rosy concatenation of a romance into an arranged marriage. This is sharply contrasted by a modern tragedy (and homage to Spanish director Pedro Almodovar) where an AIDS sufferer is abandoned by his wife. In the third short film, Kundalkar beautifully encapsulates the emotions of an educated woman whose own infertility is poignantly encircled by a profusion of symbols of fertility, whether it is the birth of a second child to her co-habiting sister-in-law or the constant rain that falls outside her window.
‘Women’s issues’ have preoccupied Marathi films for a long time now. However, as established patterns of patriarchy are put under stress by social, economic, and technological changes in India, the new challenge that arises with these transformations is how to be a ‘man’ in this new and changing world.
In Umesh Kulkarni’s Vihir, a ‘coming of age’ tale explored with great sensitivity, the sudden death of his cousin, plunges Nachiket into a search for who he is and what his life is about, before he accedes to adulthood. Interrogations on being and nothingness, on life and death, are difficult to bring to the screen, and Kulkarni’s lyrical treatment is reminiscent of Korean director, Kim Ki-Duk’s, 3 Iron (made in 2005), another contemplation on love, life, and death.
Veteran directors Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar’s Ek Cup Chya is a delightful film that is both funny and touching, about an ordinary man’s fight against the Kafkaesque workings of an indifferent, and casually cruel, bureaucracy. When bus conductor, Kashinath Sawant, wrongly receives an electricity bill for tens of thousands of rupees, his attempts to right the error draw him into a bureaucratic maze. His electricity is cut off, putting his family’s life into great hardship, in particular his son, who is studying for important school-leaving exams. As he staggers, in vain, from pillar to post, he begins to doubt his own competence to be a father, husband, and provider for his family.
But perhaps no other film addresses the issue of masculinity with as much directness as Ravi Jadhav’s Natarang. When a landowner mechanises the irrigation to his fields, Guna, a dirt-poor landless farmer decides that he and his unemployed fellow workers should chance their luck by becoming stage performers. He forms a Tamasha troupe, but with no one willing to take on the character of the ‘nachya’, the very masculine and virile Guna, transforms himself into a female impersonator.
In Jadhav’s Natarang, homosexuality, transvestism, gender-bending impersonations, and male gang rape — the latter as swift and brutal retribution when Guna inadvertently gets involved in rural politics — all investigate deep-rooted male sexual anxieties with unabashed frankness. In complete contrast, Prakash Mokashi’s ill-judged and deeply annoying Harishchandrachi Factory, takes the ‘father’ of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, and reduces him to a caricature of a well-meaning buffoon. It is unclear whether Mokashi still has a lot to learn about film-making or whether he was making a sophisticated, ironical post-modern joke — either way, the film is a disaster, making its choice as candidate for the Academy Awards (the ‘Oscars’) a very puzzling one. Whatever the failings of the organisers of the MAMI film festival, at least they had the good sense to avoid it!
All in all, while Bollywood lurches blindly from one eyewateringly extravagant project to another in search of that elusive magical formula that will make a killing at the box office, Marathi cinema, like the more responsible and mature sibling, is quietly, but confidently, showing that the way to the future for Indian cinema lies not in the loft conversions of NRIs in New York or elsewhere, but in the real hopes and anxieties of its viewing public right here.