2022, Tamil, Sony Liv, 8.2/10IMDB, Directed by Gautham Ramachandran
Another awakening plot that dwells in to the inner realms of its characters and navigates through the spaces of higher consciousness of the viewers. A narration of a sensitive premise of a young woman’s fight with the society and within, through emotional style of expression backed by structured musical pieces, is indeed a riveting account, except for few subjective perspectives, attempting to evoke certain ideas.
The premise is an apparent inspiration from the many disturbing headlines we wake up to- Child Abuse. Not many make it to the headlines, but out of those that make it, the vivid ones are the most frightful ones and the premise reminded me of the 2018 case of a differently abled 11 year girl raped by the plumber, electrician, lift operator, security guard and gardner.
The makers choose to tell the story of the accused and goes further to exhibit the ‘fourth eye perspective’. While the female protagonist’s eyes witness her father being accused, the third eye’s intuition, indicates her father after all might not be an accused. But the fourth eye, connects to the consciousness of the universe and to her creation as a girl child- The ‘girl’s instinct’ about the obscured side of her frail father.
The film intends to rip the prototype rapist image from the minds of the children and their parents. Film like the1984 ‘Kai Kodukkum Kai’ to the most recent web series ‘Suzhal’ in 2022, pointed to the trusted timid personalities, who were behind the crime against women and children. Gargi is another attempt to reinstate the fact that appearance, family background and age might be deceptive casualness, when perversion in men are concerned. While the film like ‘Peranbu’ went to depict the dilemmas of a father, about the sexuality of his differently abled adolescent girl, Gargi’s strength lies in its crux -a young girl’s hostile confrontation of the sexuality of her loving father.
The paralleling suspicions to deliberately divert the attention of the viewers are aplenty, including the widower father of the victim (played by the fantastic Salem Saravanan), the security guard colleague of the accused, the police officer curiously named Bennix Jeyaraj, reminding the custodial death of 2020 and the muscled henchmen of the victim’s father.
The writing and casting are key in films that handle emotional contents like this and Sai Pallavi fits the bill. Her subtlety in switching emotions from compassion to bleak emptiness, from pensive sadness to perseverance, from conviction to fatigue, are seamless. The actress has beautifully evolved and seems to have mastered the art of shedding the lurking smirk of her ‘Premam’ days.
Struggling lawyers taking up abandoned lawsuits due to public hatred is not new in cinema and layering the character with a trait of stammering under stress, isn’t very enterprising, one would think. But the success remains in the casting, as it seems to add newer dimension to such heroic characters. Kaali Venkat’s inherent ‘lack of guile’, works completely in his favor, when he plays lawyer ‘Indrans Kaliaperumal’s role. The actor’s proficiency in slipping into this, ‘obliging, nothing to lose’ attitude, adds to the might of the plot and the director steering away from any possible cliche chemistry, between the lead female and Indrans’s character, adds to the depth of the screenplay.
The director chooses to alleviate the discomfort of the intense drama by synchronizing his non-linear story telling, through complimenting instrumental musical arrangements. Music director, the ‘Thaikudam Bridge’ fame violinist, Govind Vasantha, renders peices of music, to adapt almost all agonizing plot points that duos with the swirling visuals, implying the washing away of the impurities.
Voluntary apertures in certain crucial sequences, seem to have been stitched to deliver highs and lows in the screenplay, but it disturbs the viewing and at some point, even questions the attentiveness of the viewers. One too many of such sequences being, the video evidence produced by Indrans in the court room. The ‘ultimatum tone’ of the victim’s father, emerges as a surprise to the viewers, in opposite to the composed exchange of dialogues in the real time scene.
Sadly, the mutilated final copy of the movie is yet another hindrance to the flow of the film, for even the retrospective revisit of the trailer, fills the blanks of some real high points of the film. Non-cohesive editing lets the screen play down in few instances and also few key characters stumbles due to that. The characters including the mother, the journalist and the fiance are nearly fossilized after a point. The ‘out of the blue’ confrontational dialogues- the police officer asserting that the team would have worked months together following Gargi’s father before arresting him, Gargi’s mom trusting in fate and not working towards winning it, she being unhappy that unfortunately Gargi happens to be a weak girl rather than a macho boy, are few such instances.
The scenario involving the sexual abuse of a young girl were handled with dignity. For reason unknown, I personally would have wished the makers not disclose the face of the child in the end, but it was vital I guess, for the story teller, to insist that the victim and the accused family have moved on to have a normal life, instead of hiding behind the past.
The makers march with pride, until the intention of the film is seemingly invalidated, with the paradox of ‘regressive puberty ceremony’, that unveils in the name of progressive representation, as the credits role- the victim gracing the convict’s daughter’s ceremony.
The intention of the maker is muddled in few closure instances, like when the confused journalist, chides her media house for pushing them for ‘flash news feeds’, which makes them source uninvestigated facts, is an irony. One such baseless hunch of her’s, turns a flash news content and ends up becoming ‘unluckily’ a true fact. The final preachy ‘pronouncement’ on womanhood by a character who is least influential in the film, is a deliberate attempt to avoid the cliche of the lead role from delivering the same.
The words of ‘hope’ that begins with a sarcastic tone, does disenchant a little, for ‘HOPE’ is an optimistic state of mind. The later half of the statement does vouch for the intention of the makers, where it talks about ‘fighting the battle out as a woman’. But the damage might have been done by then, to some weak women souls, for they already might be an emotionally drained parent of a GIRL child.
The teams proposes to teach children to stay vigil at all time and to stay strong if they had to battle it out, with the child abusers, who majority of the time are close relatives. The difficult part is to teach the girl child, NOT to spare, if the close relative turns out to be her own Father. It is a walk on eggshells for mothers, to teach their children to stay vigil even around father. Incestuous fathers might be a taboo subject in the patriarchal society of ours but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
The film intends to touch upon those lines even if it doesn’t involve an incestuous father in its story line. On the contrary it houses a father who protects his young child, from one such sex monger and advices her to stay strong in such situation, just by thinking of him as a power house of her strength. Eventually the film plays to the maker’s success, as it’s lead woman, with the very words of her father, echoing in her mind, trying to bring him under the law, to be punished for a crime that he had asked her to be vigil about- except now the offence involves ‘someone else’s loving daughter’.
It might hurt the sentiments of the viewers who are loving fathers themselves, but the world is not free of these kind of fathers who might be sexually preoccupied, adolescent regressives, instrumental sexual gratifiers, emotionally dependent or angry retaliators.
The film might not be a popular family watch but certainly a must watch for women who are mothers, to educate themselves and their girl children, rather children in general, as the reported sexual offences against young boys have alarmingly surpassed the girl’s percentage, to 52.94%.