Every 20 minutes, the screen in Anubhav Sinha’s hard-hitting thappad of a film goes red and blank with the reminder that another rape has taken place somewhere.
Does anyone care? Someone has got to. Anubhav Sinha’s film reminds us rather rudely of how easy it is to become complacent about such incidents that happen every twenty minutes. If it is a woman who is assaulted, we tut-tut for a few seconds; if it’s a child, we give it a minute or two.
But what about those whose lives are forever scarred by the obscene crime? Parima (a superbly immersive Kani Kusruti), her supportive husband Vinay (Zeeshan Ayub Mohammed, a pillar of strength), and their little son (played with heart-wrenching bewilderment by Advik Jaiswal), who doesn’t understand what has happened to Mummy.
There he stands, the little boy in the middle of the court’s yard holding jholas of files bigger than he. The files are getting bulkier, and the grief of the trauma isn’t getting any less unbearable.
“Why do you bring the child to the court?” an empathetic female lawyer asks Vinay (how many minutes of concern can she spare?).
“He is no longer a child,” Vinay replies quietly.
There is so much more that a rape takes away than the dignity of a woman: the patriarchal confidence of the husband, the innocence of the child, the warmth of the neigbours….
Anubhav Sinha’s film is high on emotional detailing. Its zero-tolerance for sappiness is one of the film’s biggest strengths. There is a flow of inevitability in the storytelling, of life taking its toll on the scarred family even as the world moves on. The survivor’s wounds heal slowly. But what about the injuries that aren’t visible to the naked eye?
There is a parallel emotional crisis running through the veins of the urgent, inexorable work of timeless topicality. It has to do with a grieving widower called Kartik. Though Kumud Mishra has plays the character compellably I would have liked to see him tell his story separately. The merger of two separated griefs doesn’t quite have the effect it should have.
But then, as Taapsee Pannu rightly surmises, we have lost the right to segregate one trauma and bereavement from another….twenty minutes remember? That may be an eternity for the assaulted but little for the bystander.
Taapsee plays Parima’s lawyer. There is quiet protest in her body language, her eyes conveying the calm before the storm. This is not a film that loses its self-control, except when depicting the actual crime. That needed to punctuated. And it is, with horrific elaboration. We have to recognize the beast before tackling it.
