Some films like Dhurandhar demand 8 hours to have their say. Others, like Razaa, this very short short-film (merely 13 minutes!) with long legs, says it all in their pithy playing time.
There is a playful undercurrent to this grim Bergmanesque little nugget.
Razaa, directed by Pooja Tolani and backed by Suresh Triveni (Tumhari Sulu, Jalsa), could just as well be titled ‘One Evening At The Doctor’s’. It catches a tense mother-daughter at a busy gynecologist’s clinic. Geetanjali Kulkarni plays the Muslim matriarch Sabeen with her teenaged daughter Razaa (Bhumika Sharma).
Kulkarni’s immediate and ineradicable grip over her character’s mounting tension, conveyed in a twitch and sigh, comes as no surprise to anyone who has been watching this astounding actress trapeze from one character to another for an eternity.
The way our myopic industry takes true actors for granted is a subject worthy of an entire thesis.
It is young Bhumika Sharma Sabeen’s daughter who is the real surprise of this wonderfully deceptive little drama of dissension.
There is a twist to the tale of a mother-daughter’s temperamental tryst with an urgent medical problem , a twist so thought-provoking and questioning of our mindset on sexual mores and a woman’s right to make her own decisions on her body, that I wondered why we need four hours to spread malevolence when we can just as well propound empathy in thirteen minutes.
And yes, it helps that the two actresses look like mother and daughter. Sharmila Tagore looked nothing like Rituparna Ghosh’s mother in Puratawn. Neither did Sara Arjun look like Rakesh Bedi’s daughter in Dhurandhar. But that is another story.
