Three Movies in Thirty-Six Hours

I am coming back to this space after an entire year to talk about a highly unusual experience I had recently.

About a fortnight ago, I saw three films and gave a talk about another two within one weekend.

Three movies in three days might never get repeated but what an experience that was! Especially due to the movies and the diversity they represented.

The first was a Hindi movie about a young woman who refuses to be objectified to a role. I saw this on Friday afternoon, partly in preparation for the academic talk I was to give on “Femininity and Play in Two Contemporary Bollywood Movies” in a webinar for students from two colleges that were bridging the North-South divide in India through this collaborative effort. One college is in Hyderabad and the other in Patna!

I overcame my resistance to the movie and saw it because I wanted to check for myself the depiction of Indian femininity that led to the mixed reports it got in 2020, when the movie was released.

The movie was Thappad and my long resistance to the movie was on account of the title.

A thappad, a slap, is more often that not construed as an act of violence perpetrated on one person by another and holds within it a sense of inequality in the relationship. Having heard that the female protagonist of the movie is a homemaker, I made the error of thinking that it was a movie about domestic violence and had avoided watching a movie on such a grave topic when we were grappling with the worries emerging from a global pandemic.

Although the movie did not contribute much to my talk on femininity and play, it made me realise that finally some voices in the large realm of Hindi cinema are representing women as people who see themselves as people—not as mothers, mother-in-laws, wives, sisters, girlfriends, lovers. And all of this through a series of potent shots and actions that would be immediately understood by any regular viewer of Hindi cinema. This was more than worthy of the three hours I spent on it on a week-day afternoon. And will probably lead me to a more academic examination of the crux of the movie very soon. Fingers crossed.

I can safely say that the Saturday night movie is one that I will not engage with academically. Though it was totally worthy of the really expensive IMAX ticket and I happily thank my friend for picking the perfect seats for that movie—absolutely the centre of the hall—this one got stored in my head as a one-liner my higher secondary school Physics teacher used to repeat fairly often, not just during the Solid State Physics module of the syllabus. This excellent teacher would remind us that "when Physics ends Metaphysics begins", and managed to get young adults like me to think in terms of the enigma and ethics of science. Thanks to my teacher, I realized that the makers of the film expected the viewers to have about as much knowledge of quantam theory as we would need that of kinematics to enjoy a James Bond movie. Nolan did with more Hollywood elan what the makers of Pathan did in true Bollywood fashion six months ago—make a stylish movie bordering on the absurd about an unlikely national hero who suffers pangs of conscience for ‘saving’ their nation through warfare.

Sunday’s movie stands on even more ethically shaky terrain, for it talks of feminism through a very glamourous object of a world steeped in consumerism. But it was a very intelligently made movie that has also become a global hit – Greta Grewig’s Barbie.

I had to see Barbie for many reasons. The most important one was that I research childhood and have recently published a monograph on the child-toy link in literature and in the cultures of childhood.

As a researcher of childhood, I have observed that children really do not need any store-bought toy to play happily. However, I was also curious about this record-making movie of the most famous doll in the modern history of toys for girls.

It's equally true that as an 80s child in India I had never played with a Barbie.

The first time I saw a Barbie was when I was in middle school.

A friend smuggled in her younger sister's Barbie – a gift from a Dubai-based relative – into our Jesuit convent school. She passed a chit among the girls in class that she has something exciting to show us during the short interval. A bunch of us crowded around her and she brought out a doll dressed in a parrot green sari with a zari border with tiny chilli red ambis (paisley) motifs on the border. The doll was inside the box that it had come in and she did not dare to take it out of the box. All of us – preteen schoolgirls in small town India – admired the absolute beauty of that very tall doll and thought it was extremely glamourous. But it was definitely not a doll! What can anyone do with it but keep it on display? Would our friend's little sister be allowed to play with it? Or would it go on the top shelf of the mantel piece of their home? That was the discussion for the day during the lunch interval.

This was the late-1980s. We hadn't heard of terms like liberalisation and globalisation.

The Barbie did not mean anything to me as a child.

It was a toy that didn’t even have the shape of a child and therefore seemed like a fairly useless doll for a child to identify with to the researcher in me in the early 2000s in India.

However, I have been recommending the movie to all my friends who have young daughters. We are in a globalized, neo-liberal, consumer-centric world. It makes total sense to use a toy they are familiar with to learn the basics of self-actualisation. Depsite all my reservations about the doll and all that it represents, I salute Greta Grewig and her team for appropriating the many shades of pink in Barbieworld to let growing-up girls know that pink too can be cool if one chooses it consciously with all the challenges it throws up at people growing up in a post-feminist, post-LGBTQA+, globalised world.

Although I enjoyed Oppenheimer and Barbie in two different ways, the movie that will stay with me for the depth of message it conveyed for my fellow countrymen/ women/ non-binary adults and young adults is Thappad.

It told us that no one has a right to the body and being of anyone in any sort of intimate or co-dependent relationship. And that for love to sustain through the complexities of marriage each partner needs to respect the others personhood.  

Thappad is a movie I will recommend to everybody I know.