Gargi (SonyLIV)
Directed by Gautham Ramachandran
Rating: *** 1/2
There is so much to admire in Gautham Ramachandran’s Tamil film Gargi, that it becomes heartbreaking to watch it throw it all away in pursuit of a “shocking” unexpected senseless selfdefeating twist at the end, almost like Manisha Koirala coming alive at the end of Sanjay Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical, except that there is no happy resolution in Gargi.
Sai Pallavi once again plays the pertinacious workingclass girl. In fact it can’t get any more workingclass than this: Gargi’s father Brahmanand(R S Shivaji) is a watchman in a building. Gargi works as school teacher. She is engaged to marry a man who is considerate and amusing. There is a cute upama joke about Gargi’s mother at the start between Gargi and her man. When she smiles the world seems a better place.
Gargi’s toil-filled but peaceful existence comes tumbling down when her father is held as one of the accused in the gangrape of a 9-year child. The stigmatization of Gargi’s family, the isolation and humiliation, the trial by media…are all sensitively adumbrated in the screenplay. Sai Pallavi makes Gargi’s struggle so tangible, it is as though we are sweating and sobbing it out with her. We want her to just ….slow down.
The relentless pacing is the film’s undoing. Suddenly it all begins to feel a little over-burdened with plot manoeuvres as though the director cares deeply about his subject but is being dictated to by the demands of the boxoffice.
The jobless stuttering lawyer Indrans who moonlights as a pharmacist, played with brilliant restraint by Kali Venkat, seems too much of a convenient contrivance especially since his knowledge of prescription drugs comes in handy in the court to bail out Gargi’s father.
In the courtroom the presiding judge turns out to be transgender which is very token-friendly and admirably ‘woke’ of the writer and director.But it seems like a bit of a stretch especially when Her Honor gets chance to declare, “I know both the arrogance of a man and the pain of being a woman. I am best qualified to judge this case.”
Ok , if you say so! I almost expected Gargi’s attorney-ally Indrans to be gay, since tokenism seems to be the order of the day, and since Indrans shows no interest in Gargi eventhough they spend nearly all their waking hours together trying to find ways to get her father out of jail.
The shared agony of Gargi and her lawyer are the best moments in a screenplay that veers from agonized authenticity to manufactured drama. The denouement was so selfdefeating that I wondered if there would be a twist beyond the twist at the end to rectify the suicidal finale.Giving in to extraneous pressures so close to the closure seems unbelievably compromised . Is this what Gargi’s story had to come to?Ironically it is all about Gargi’s refusal to compromise.
The enormously compromised ending notwithstanding, Gargi has an abundance of conflicting emotions to offer. All the sleeping dogs in the bumpy ride are calmed by Sai Pallavi’s central performance. She is powerful without trying,compelling without crying. In her last film Virata Parvan she was able to make a strong impact despite a weak screenplay.
In Gargi there is nothing weak about the film or the heroine.It’s just the determination to keep audiences hooked till the end that does Gargi in.Nevertheless an important film on the subject of child abuse and rape .
