A small, unseen film

In all the online discourse I’ve seen around Ra.One, what makes me want to tear my hair out is when its apologists say things like “Okay, it isn’t a great film – but you have to respect all the hard work that Shah Rukh and his team have put into it.”

In other words: so what if this is a cringe-inducingly uneven, appallingly written and imagined movie that offends the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about good science-fiction/fantasy or video games – we are STILL dutybound to scrape at the altars of the obscenely rich Bollywood deities who condescended to bring it to us.

To clarify, I have no real problem with anyone honestly thinking Ra.One was a good film (though I wouldn’t want to spend much time talking about movies with them). But whenever I hear the “respect the money and effort” plea, I think about the many people I know who have been struggling just as hard to realise their cinematic visions – and to bring them to an audience a tiny fraction of Ra.One’s – in more difficult circumstances.

I think, for example, about Shekhar Hattangadi, the associate director of a little film called Teen Behenein, which was directed by Kundan Shah for Zee Telefilms six years ago, and which you won't even find listed on IMDB. For the past few weeks, Hattangadi – who is in his mid-50s – has been in Delhi on his own initiative with a single DVD of the movie, screening it at colleges, trying to spread word about it through his contacts. For reasons that are unclear to me, there is no expectation that this film will get a commercial release or a DVD release anytime soon. This is a pity.

Teen Behenein, inspired by countless tragic stories from across India, is about three young sisters from a lower-middle class family who decide to commit suicide to relieve their parents from the burden of dowry demands (and the social derision when they are unable to meet them). It isn’t a great film – it occasionally struggles to balance the requirements of gritty, issue-oriented cinema with the need to simplify an issue for a general audience. It’s also a little tacky in places: a key fantasy scene near the end involves a particularly unfortunate costuming decision (Death in a crotch-less tin suit?) that might throw off even the most sensitive, invested viewer. But it works well when it focuses – as it usually does – on the interactions between the three girls on the last day of their lives: their personal equations, their responses to the little interruptions that keep delaying their plan, the slivers of hope and optimism filtering in through their despair.

At a screening I attended, the audience didn’t seem to care for the inclusion of songs in what they probably expected to be a strictly “realist” film. But I liked the way the musical interludes (mostly gentle, tuneful and convincingly acted) punctuated the narrative and caught the girls’ vacillating moods. One of the songs even facilitates Shah’s famous knack for injecting morbid humour into a seemingly cheerful situation: there’s a shot where the sisters – singing, skipping about, feeling temporarily sanguine about things – playfully don black veils, hang their heads and swing their arms limply to mimic a post-hanging posture. In hindsight it’s one of the film’s most vivid images, a representation of three spirited young people suddenly turned into corpses. Time and again, we see that these girls have potentially bright and meaningful lives ahead of them, but that they have been conditioned to believe there is no future, no way out. (At the beginning of the film, the feisty youngest sister insists on writing her own - presumably sharply worded - suicide note for their parents. Near the end, we see her tearing this note up – it’s a distressing but inevitable moment in a story about the crushing of individuality.)

The three central performances (by Amrita Subhash, Shiju Kataria and especially Kadambari Kadam as the youngest sister) are very strong, which brings me to something worth mentioning about the making of this film. If you see the discipline of good theatre acting here, that’s because Shah and his team extensively rehearsed every sequence in long takes – choreographing the characters’ movements and conversations within the small space that the story is set in – before they ever switched on the cameras. The result was that very little film stock was wasted on multiple takes and the shooting ratio was very low – which is important for a low-budget production. Given some of the crud that not only makes it to multiplexes these days but also gets ridiculous amounts of media coverage, I think it's a pity that films like Teen Behenein – low-key, well-intentioned, flawed in some ways but with strong points too – aren’t assured even a TV screening.

[Also see: this post by someone who attended a JNU screening and was disturbed by how disconnected some other viewers were from the types of lives depicted in the film. Tehelka has this interview with Shekhar Hattangadi. And Trisha Gupta’s Sunday Guardian review is here]