Mangalavaaram(Telugu, Disney+Hostar)
Starring Payal Rajput , Nanditha Swetha, Divya Pillai, Azmal, Ravindra Vijay, Krishna Chaitanya
Written & Directed by Ajay Bhupathi
Rating: * ½
It is hard to sit through a film where the primary protagonist is beaten,harassed, flogged(yes with a proper whip) , gangraped and finally murdered and thrown into a well.
Well , well! And the writer-director Ajay Bhupathi who released the film in several languages(including Hindi) feels he is doing the cause of female empowerment a great service. He lays on so much misery pain and torture on his protagonist Shailaja(Payaj Rajput) that it begins to feel suspiciously and disturbingly vicarious.
At the start Shailaja as a child is molested by the father of the boy she loves. The boy perishes in a temple fire.
The above preamble should serve as sufficient warning as to which way the wind is likely to blow in this gospel of gruesomeness set in a village run by a tyrant zamindar and his ostensibly kind God-fearing wife(Divya Pillai) where every character is what he or she doesn’t seem to be, and that includes a lecher who comments on women’s vital statistics with lipsmacking relish, and his blind sidekick who keeps asking detailed description of what his boss is leering at.
There are ghosts around who write warning prophecies on walls on the fate of womanizers in the village, and there is an angry female cop Maya(Nanditha Swetha) who swears to bring the culprits to book while the men stand around leering and passing comments on her and every woman in the village except maybe their own mothers and sisters.
But the focus is largely on poor Shailaja who is hurled around by the menfolk while the director and his cameraman stand back to make noises of disapproval and anger. It’s like a mob lynching where the one who instigated the mob are the ones making the most noise about it.
Dangerously, the screenplay cannot make the distinction between cheering and jeering. It thinks putting a woman through the grinder will actually have her emerging stronger.Tragically Shailaja is rendered completely powerless .She is sexualized by all and sundry. And to add brutal insult to irredeemable injury, she is declared to be suffering from a medical condition where she cannot control her sexual urges.
The fault therefore, dear readers, lies not with the stars, but the woman herself! If films like Mangalavaaram and Animal have audiences roaring in approval, then we are in for a lot of trouble as a society of moviegoers .
