Director Gangadhar’s Telugu film makes a number of thrusts and lunges at relevant issues regarding a woman’s right to say no.
In a post-interval sequence, a boorish defence lawyer even pokes fun at the ‘No Means No’ courtroom argument in the film Pink just to make the point that the reason why women suffer sexual assaults is because this world is filled with insensitive men, a point that is hammered in twice over when the lawyer wife turns out to be a victim of regular marital rape.
This is just way too much of relevance for the film directed by Gangadhar to remain relevant. It tilts to the trite with the burden of its own relevance and topples over. The script is carpeted with sermonistic references to ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘marital rape’ and ‘patriarchy’ but these are just fashionable jargon in a film that sinks under the burden of its own pretensions even as it purports to swim in topical tides.
The plot is so self-consciously serious it is laughably unhinged. The hero Raj (Vikas Vasishtha) is an “eminent surgeon”(a description hammered in so many times it feels like a military drill) .We soon know why he is what he is. His devoted traditional godfearing wife Mahathi (Priya Vadlamani) goes into a coma after an accident while his girlfriend Maya (Ayesh Khan) has lost her face in a horrid road accident.
So what does Raj do? He replaces Maya’s face with Mahathi’s! No consents from the victim’s family. No yes or no from any kith or kin of the two women. Just the surgery after which Maya wakes up with Mahathi’s face.
What follows is beyond ludicrous . Suffice it to say that marital rape as a subject for melodrama not only feels wrong, it just sucks. The sleaziness of the characters permeates into the storytelling , making all the film’s good intentions (if there were any, to begin with) seem ill-informed and exploitative. At one point in the storytelling Maya has her husband’s best friend to the bed and a hammer falling on his private parts.
“Baby, soon you will be in condition to have any baby,” Maya with Mahathi’s croons to a man who was until a while ago,her husband’s friend .
The squirms are unlimited.
Maya (now with Mahathi’s face) sets out to take revenge on Raj, with Mahathi’s face. The courtroom sequences are meant to come alive since a big star is brought into the picture as Maya/Mahathi’s lawyer. Vishwak Sen is to Mukhachitram what Sunny Deol was to Damini.
There too a rape had occurred. A young woman was sexually violated in Damini. In Mukhachitram the audience feels more violated than the characters on screen. Exploitative, loud, vulgar and self important, this is the worst kind of cinema posing as something far loftier than it actually is.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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