Writer and Director: Sandeep Kumar
The rather young producer is practical. “Heroes are the reason we make money in Bollywood,” he says . Real-life producer and director Sandeep Kumar has boldly made a film which is all about heroines.
The star is Mehrunisa herself. Freshly widowed from her highly respected and controlling husband, she goes shopping with a prettily beribboned young girl, her house -keeper’s daughter. She buys a heavy-duty axe and a hammer. Then she sets about dismantling her past. Her husband has not been dead a day when Bollywood comes calling, inviting the once famous actress to make a comeback in a film about the Siege of Lucknow. It’s a vehicle for a well-known eighty-year-old actor. She would be playing his wife. The script erases the enormous contribution women made to an historic event . After forty-five years Mehrunisa has had enough of being “a footman of a nawab.”
The household includes four generations of women. Mehrunisa herself is played by the late, majestically handsome Farrukh Jaffar. Returning from her axe-buying errand she drops in on the white -swathed women at the funeral prayer meeting, standing in the doorway with aquiline contempt. Her voice is harshly musical; everything she says sounds like a sibylline pronouncement. Emerging from years of subjection, she is not impressed by male affectations. Men who provoke her ire get attacked with the fly swatter. Her daughter Yasmin has her own problems. Divorced and short of money, she is keen to sell the dilapidated family mansion and move to a grander modern – “so people might respect us more.”
Yasmin’s daughter Aliya dreams of working for the BBC in London, and standing on her own feet, but she is on the brink of falling into the marriage trap that constrained the lives of her mother and grandmother. There is also Amina, the devoted but opinionated housekeeper, and her daughter Noor, who is Mehrunisa’s eager accomplice. Other women are involved in the story. On Amina’s insistence, Mehrunisa visits a medium. Already irritated by the smoke being wafted around, she glares at the red fairy lights and rubbishes the stuff about “a huge shadow hovering over your fate” – she just wants to set herself free from her husband’s influence. There is also a female TV host, and – near the end – an important wealthy woman watching the TV show.
Men are kept noticeably out of the spotlight. They are all fairly awful, with the exception of one helpful and generous ally. There is a buffoonish estate agent, who infuriates Mehrunisa, but whose inept effort to charm Yasmin leads her to recover a pleasure of her youth, and to one of the film’s most visually delightful scenes. Some of them are barely present: one is just a photograph, another appears only on a screen, and Yusuf the driver is seen in the rear-view mirror, while lecturing Yasmin about the shame her mother is bringing on the family.
The system which Yusuf admires – he learnt it from the Nawab, whom he liked a lot more than Mehrunisa did, is called in the film “lordism.” It seems to be a mixture of feudalism and patriarchy – definitely disadvantageous to women. While dutifully acknowledging the difficulties women face, perhaps more acutely in India than is some other countries, the film , with its optimistic ending, is very much fantasy. Jaffar was a well-established actress who, in later life, worked consistently, a box-office name in her own right. Ankita Dubey , who plays Aliya, looks suspiciously like a film star, so it stretches the credulity when the casting director and his assistant visit the family home, and they somehow don’t notice her sitting glamorously at the kitchen table. The background of what sounds like telephone hold music has a trivialising effect. There is a vox pop near the end where people in the street are asked if they would watch a film starring an eighty-year-old actress. Everybody says yes. But that’s Bollywood.
Mehrunisa is screening at the third watchAUT Austrian Film Festival from 13 -16 March.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Silver screen star
