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Director
: Manish Jha
Starring : Tulip Joshi, Sudhir
Pandey, Sushant Singh, Piyush Mishra |
| Matrubhoomi
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| Matrubhoomi
Movie Review : |
 Somewhere
in the future when famale foeticide has felled the female
population a group of barbaric sex-starved men in Bihar
marry one woman and rape her night after night in turns
in Manish Jha's film… that's when they are not
busy making out with boys and cows or whatever outlet
is obtainable or available.
Manish Jha's sinister
sordid and ceaselessly appalling view of patriarchal
perversity is at once shocking and intolerable. As in
Shekhar Kapur's BANDIT QUEEN the immediate impulse while
watching this film about male-maid madness is to turn
away and walk out…. Jha turns the gender corkscrew
so hard that you, the audience, go beyond squirming
to a region of response to the visual stimuli that borders
on the repugnant.
As you watch the film's
only female character Kalki (much in demand, though
for only sexual gratification) being ravaged in every
conceivable corner of the astutely created rustic home,
you wonder where the line between social criticism and
artistic licentiousness blurs, and how far a filmmaker
can transgress the dividing line between aesthetics
and realism without seeming to violate the basic codes
of filmmaking. Not that the rape of Kalki is ever titillating…
God forbid! If anything, Jha's perception on sexual
aggression is so blunt and violent it could put the
audience off sex forever.
In sequence after sequence
a cloistered and crude family of 5 men and their father
march into poor Kalki's bedroom to get their pound of
flesh. In a grotesque parody of Draupadi and her five
Pandava husbands in the Mahabharat Kalki is posturized
as a playpen of masculine perversity. Watching Kalki's
brutal sexual exploitation by bestial specimen of the
male gender is certainly not "entertaining".
One isn't very sure how far Jha's tormenting and nightmarish
treatise on sexual subjugation and domination could
qualify as cinema, let alone pure cinema.
The purity-if one may
call it that-of Jha's vision originates largely from
his ability to stare unflinchingly at socio-cultural
discrimination and barbarism. Scenes of gender and caste
carnage are so strongly violent; they make similar moments
in Prakash Jha's DAMUL and MRITYUDAND look like teaser
trailers.
Indeed the director's perceptions on mob violence are
stunningly upfront. Manish Jha goes into the lives in
rural Bihar and its accompanying anarchy with a frightening
detachment. He's neither shocked nor appalled by how
cruel humankind can be to their own kind. Jha simply
gives the picture, unexpunged and unalloyed. A sequence
such as the one where the 'bride' is exposed in full
view to be a boy is too cruel to be comic. Jha never
allows us the luxury of a smile. He's dead serious about
his grim intentions. The impact is lethally lacerating.
We come out of MATRUBHOOMI battered and ravaged by its
oppressive command over the language of sexual tyranny.
The sex act has never been more denuded of eroticism.
And you applaud the way in which the narrative makes
Kalki a force to wreck-on with, without sentimentalizing
her plight. Beyond a point MATRUBHOOMI becomes tortuously
redundant in its vision. Watching the woman's relentless
rape is tantamount hammering in a point beyond the desired
impact. Deliberately Jha desists from softening the
blow. There are no 'gentle' men in MATRUBHOOMI except
Sushant Singh who plays Kalki's youngest and gentlest
spouse. Their moments of shared romantic respite are
quickly and cruelly nipped in the bud. Sushant Singh's
fratricide (this is the second film in two weeks-after
Sarkar-where a brother slays his own) signals the complete
death of compassion in Manish Jha's world of maniacal
masculinity. Thereafter Kalki encounters just two affectionate
men, both underage and both servants in her high-caste
in-laws' home from a lower caste, who assuage the weltering
wounds in her womb.
What stuns you beyond
reason is the director's unblinking barbarism of vision.
What makes Manish Jha so passionately cynical about
the man-woman axis in rural India? Where does the film's
mind-blowing vision of masculine morbidity originate
from? Pictures of a civilization gone to seed have ranged
in cinema from Raj Kapoor's JAGTE RAHO to Steven Spielberg's
WAR OF THE WORLDS. It's impossible to categorize Jha's
take on sexual terror. Cinema per se entails a sense
of liberation, a feeling of lyricism, if you will. Even
the raw and real Bandit Queen was at the end of the
dread, a vendetta tale where the casualty of oppression
finally got her revenge.
Though Matrubhoomi ends
on a positive note (absurdly penciled in to avoid charges
of excessive pessimism) it remains, to the end, dialectic
on doom. From the time the unpoilt Kalki is spotted
by the predatory pundit (Piyush Mishra, doing a flatulent
take on authenticity) to her marriage to five husband
by her avaricious father (spotted later in brand new
red Maruti talking into a mobile phone, collecting an
extra lakh from his daughter's in-laws as they had never
mentioned the father-in-law would be taking turns with
her) to her repeated rape by her in-laws and disgruntled
sections of the caste-pillaged village… MATRUBHOOMI
remains a saga of the damned.
You can't take away
a single bright moment from this film. There are none.
Hence the disturbing thought: what purpose does the
cinema of social conscientiousness serve without a cathartic
counter-point? And the lush ripe over-saturated cinematography
by Venu… what purpose does it serve except to
amplify the horror and trauma of the woman's violation
as weighed against the uncomplaining rusticity of her
surroundings?
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