Mrs
Starring Sanya Malhotra
Directed by Aarti Kadav
This seems to be the week of honourable but adventurous remakes. While Advait Chandan’s Loveyapa is that slurpy healthy fast food that doesn’t trivialize the palate of the original, Mrs, directed by debutante Aarti Kadav, cracks the adaptive code without any mishap.
Ms Kadav has Sanya Malhotra’s stout support from first to last frame, just as director Jeo Baby had Nimisha Sajan in the original Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen.
This may sound shocking to the purists. But I actually “enjoyed” Mrs more than The Great Indian Kitchen, which is not to say that the original was a lesser film. It was probably a much more accomplished work. But heck, Mrs is just so much more immersive. Part of it comes from Malhotra, who captures the horror of a newly married woman trapped in the kitchen with a seamless spontaneity.
But there is more: the director peels off the various layers of patriarchal normalization of a housewife’s kitchen captivity to project the protagonist, Richa, as an individual rather than a prototype. We relate to her not as an illustrative figure, not as a moment in the history of female emancipation, but as an individual, hurting, suffering, healing….
Some of the most powerful sequences from the original have been re-imagined in the remake, with telling consequences. The wife’s outburst about her sexual frustrations due to the lack of foreplay has been shifted from a tentative moment in bed to a full-on tirade when the husband asks for a quickie since he has twenty minutes to while away before leaving for work.
The underexposed Nishant Dahiya, in the difficult role of the husband, determined to make his new bride the docile cow whom he can milk at his convenience, pitches in a credible performance. So does Kanwaljeet as the nameless father-in-law who chides his anxious Bahu for using the mixie instead of the grindstone, thereby losing the ‘swad’ in the chutney.
Happily, this is one preparation that never loses its swad, even in its bleakest moments. The agile storytelling doesn’t miss a single beat; not a single strand of coriander goes unattended as Richa huddles in anxious exhaustion over the stove.
Many had seen the original film as belonging to the horror genre. The remake does not whittle away at the horror of a housewife’s tireless toil in the kitchen. What Mrs does is to show with brutal charm how wrong the normalization of a woman’s enslavement to patriarchal demands can get if left unattended: like the leaky pipe in Richa’s kitchen.
