Mehta dramatizes backstories of rapists, victim in ‘Anatomy’ – Indian films portray stalking of women as cool, romantic
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In late December 2012, 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh was beaten and gang-raped by six men aboard a moving bus in New Dehli, eventually succumbing from her injuries two days later. The incident shook the conscience of a nation, sparking widespread protests across India and a broader conversation about public safety and a culture that foments vicious misogyny. Last year, the acclaimed documentary “India’s Daughter” offered a comprehensive overview of the assault and its aftermath, and now Deepa Mehta’s semi-experimental feature “Anatomy of Violence” imagines scenes that weren’t part of the public record. Using improvisational techniques, Mehta dramatizes the backstories of the rapists and their victim, but 96 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to place the crime in a credible social context. Despite a heightened awareness of rape culture and its tragic consequences, her catastrophically misjudged film will struggle to add to the discussion. |
Sacrificing the visual splendor of her Elements trilogy (“Fire”, “Earth”, “Water”) and her Salman Rushdie adaptation, “Midnight’s Children,” for a more urgent, stripped-down aesthetic, Mehta and her cast set about imagining the unimaginable. Without forgiving the men for the crimes (the narrator often throws in a derogatory noun to describe them), “Anatomy of Violence” strongly indicts the system that breeds them, rooting their actions in poverty, ignorance, and masculine abuse. Mehta has made a thoughtful, responsible, empathetic statement that carefully tiptoes around the cavernous pitfalls of moral relativism. A statement, however, is not easily dramatized.
Detail
Broken down into four chapters that detail the past (“Lives Lived”), the day of the rape (“Towards Zero”), the immediate consequences (“Division of Spoils”), and the coda (“Aftermath”), “Anatomy of Violence” gets better as it goes along, but it starts at a low place. Harnessing their performances from an improvisatory workshop, Mehta’s actors, who share screenplay credit, also play themselves as children, which is the first and biggest of the film’s mistakes. The spectacle of five twentysomething men, four of them with beards, cowering and crying like little children is a distraction that takes away from the domestic violence that defines their upbringing. (The narrator also has to inform the audience, repeatedly, of a character’s age, because there would be no other way to tell.)
Mehta dutifully stages scenes from the lives of all five men — the sixth rapist, the bus driver, does not get a backstory — but she doesn’t have nearly enough time to sketch their particulars. From early childhood to young adulthood, their stories coalesce into a harmony of horror: Extreme poverty, a lack of education, petty criminality, and abusive fathers, for starters, along with indicators of misogyny, violence, and sexual deviance. Without absolving these men, Mehta makes a sincere, if regrettably crude, effort to address the social ills that account for their behavior.
Mehta also wants the humanity of the victim acknowledged, too, so the film devotes time to the luminous Janki (Janki Bisht), whose personal and professional ambitions were tragically cut short. “I’m proud to be a girl in India,” Janki says at one point, an indicator of how much the film embraces her image as a martyred avatar of the country’s progressive hopes. As if to preserve that image, Mehta ends Janki’s scenes with a freeze-frame on her face, a stylistic tic that’s meant to capture a fleeting moment out of time.
Also:
CHENNAI, India: The portrayal of women chased and harassed by spurned lovers in south Indian films has made stalking a “cool, romantic thing to do” activists said on Tuesday, urging the film industry to stop glorifying a crime that has resulted in violent deaths.
“Tamil films routinely promote stalking as an acceptable, even preferred way of wooing a woman,” drama researcher Iswarya V. stated in an online petition that is gathering support from movie-goers, activists and even a few actors.
“These films continually reinforce the message that stalkers will ultimately be rewarded for their persistence…It also denies women the right to say ‘no’ to their stalker.”
In the last few months, the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu has reported half a dozen cases of women being murdered in their homes, classrooms and in public spaces for rejecting men who have stalked them. (RTRS)
In August, a stalker walked into the home of a schoolgirl, set himself on fire and hugged her, all the while saying that he would not let her live for spurning him.
In July, a female software engineer was hacked to death in broad daylight at a train station in the port city of Chennai by a man who had stalked her for months.
By Scott Tobias
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