By Subhash K Jha
Film: “Firebrand”; Director: Aruna Raje; Starring: Usha Jadav, Girish Kulkarni, Sachin Khedekar, Rajeshwari Sachdeva; Rating: one and a half stars
Nothing can be more tragic than a well-intended film getting it all wrong. For no fault of the actors, I might add.
Director Aruna Raje has an interesting trajectory. She co-directed the strong marital drama “Shaque” in the early 1970s and has never shunned away from exploring issues related to the “F” word that rhymes with “Shaque”. In “Rihaee” she had boldly cast Hema Malini as the wife of a migratory husband who needs sexual fulfillment. Koi shaque? (Any doubt?)
In “Firebrand”, the Netflix film produced by Priyanka Chopra and her mother, the sexual desires of the protagonists arA put under the absurdest of ordeals to make the characters illustrative of various brands of sexual dynamics. The protagonist Sunanda,a divorce lawyer played by the talented Usha Jadav, struggles with various demons including rape which happened when she was a teenager. The traumatic experience impinges on her marriage to the unbelievably kind and considerate Madhav (Girish Kulkarni) who is so much an emblem of detoxicated masculinity that he appears to be a caricature of spousal compassion.
After a misfired bout of sexual intercourse with his wife (shot with a clumsiness that comes naturally to all demonstration of intimacy in Indian cinema) Madhav tells Sunanda it’s “okay” to not have sex in their marriage because love and sex are two issues.
Really, now?
Taking her husband’s words to an extreme of literalness, the film’s fornicatory finale has Sunanda indulging in a bizarre one-night stand where a man, whose wife Sunanda was trying to get a good divorce deal for, visits her at an unearthly hour, talks esoteric nonsense ,then offers her a neck massage which soon turns into a body massage followed by ferocious sex.
The next morning Sunanda, glowing like a mixie-mug newly rinsed, her (kind, compassionate, etc) husband (who had gone away to give his wife space to breed.I mean, breathe), tells his wife in not so many words, “Guess what? I had fabulous sex with a stranger last night”.
She looks at him as if she had just cracked the Sunny Leone quiz on porn.
Actor Girish Kulkarni’s confused expression after that said it all. If you have seen Hollywood actor Armie Hammer play the supportive husband to his attorney wife in the marriage of equals in “On The Basis Of Sex”, you would know where Madhav and Sunanda in “Firebrand” are coming from.
This husband is not supportive, he is plainly an imbecile. And this marriage is not a marriage of equals but a marriage of lopsided equality.
Would the director explain how Sunanda allows a stranger to barge into her house in the middle of the night to give her a body massage and lot more? This sequence shoots down any earlier effort to portray Sunanda as a liberated empowered thinking woman. No. She is plain nuts.
Speaking of nutty women, there is the talented Rajeshwari Sachdeva playing a neurotic wife who piece by piece destroys her marriage with a god rich man (Sachin Khedekar, he of the massage fame, mentioned earlier). This parallel plot would have made a lot more sense, as it deals with the misuse of Article 498 by vengeful wives, were it not so crudely handled.
Sachdeva struggles to give credence to her character, but fails. The writing is so clearly blurred, confused and anorexic, it leaves the talented cast groping for ways to elevate a fast-sinking narrative.
“Firebrand” means well. It wants us to empathise with a rape victim’s efforts to rise above her past tragedy. But the methods employed are so amateurish you wonder what the director and her writers were thinking while assembling the damaged plot about damaged characters.
Often I found myself laughing at purportedly serious drama. In one sequence with a psychiatrist, the rape victim is given a large teddy bear (black of course) as a representation of her rapist. She is asked to violate the teddy as though he was real. Jadhav does some serious stomping and screaming as though putting a bonfire gone out of control.
The sequence is a hoot. As part of further therapy, Sunanda is told to write out her rape experience and read it out to herself over and over again.
I suggest a similar exercise for the makers writers of “Firebrand”. It may help them to forgive themselves for what they’ve done to the cause of feminist cinema.
(Subhash K Jha can be contacted at [email protected])
–IANS
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