Engazing with empathy through the female gaze (2024)

Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies) has got me thinking once again about Salaar, Animal, Pushpa, the KGF franchise and their ilk. Kiran Rao's sophom*ore directorial venture was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2023 and will be in Indian theatres in March. For those who have watched it, it may seem blasphemous to mention Rao's quiet study of human nature in the same breath as these other films with their loud, celebratory parades of aggressive masculinity that are all the rage at the Indian box-office these days. But hear me out.

Two brides in rural north India who accidentally swap places after their respective weddings are the central figures in LL. Both are lost, not merely in the physical sense after this inadvertent switch, but also in terms of larger existential questions. As their grooms search for them, the women end up finding themselves.

A lot has been written over the years about the male gaze in cinema. This is not a term to be used literally. 'The male gaze' is not merely 'the gaze of a man'. It is the gaze of a man who lacks empathy. It is a gaze that may appear to serve the cause of patriarchy and its collaborations with other forms of supremacism, but in fact does a disservice to women and men.

Likewise, 'the female gaze' is not merely 'the gaze of a woman'. It is the gaze of a woman who possesses empathy. LL is a wonderful illustration of this empathy informing the cinematic treatment of women and men characters, and benefitting both.

Rao's film is based on a story by Biplab Goswami, with a screenplay and dialogues by Sneha Desai and additional dialogues by Divyanidhi Sharma. The narrative foregrounds two missing brides, but covers within its space a rainbow spectrum of women, their equations with each other and with men.

There is a feisty youngster stretching at the straitjacket of social constraints; a saas and bahu who snipe at each other, but also connect; a conservative mother burdened by societal demands who, in turn, cruelly weighs her daughter down; another youngster who is governed by her social conditioning until exposure to a non-conformist woman causes her to progress in believable baby steps; an angry elderly rebel; sisters-in-law as potential friends; and a supportive sister.

The men of LL are just as varied. They range from evil to good to evolving. None of them is a cliche. None of them is a saviour. None of them is whitewashed. Some of them become allies as they grow over the course of the storyline. All of them feel real.

Now contrast LL's men with the cardboard cut-outs dished out as heroes by some of the biggest pan-India blockbusters of recent years. The protagonist in Animal is a pathetic creature who overcompensates for his insecurities with rage, bloodletting, animosity towards women, contempt for gentle men, and a phallic fixation that manifests itself in repeated chatter about his organs and an obsession with guns.

The script is designed to earn audience sympathy for this chap, yet it reduces him to a cartoon. Horrific violence is presented as the inevitable response of self-respecting, wronged men in films such as Animal, Pushpa: The Rise, KGF 1&2 and Salaar.

Note how writer-director Prashant Neel slipped hom*o-erotic undertones into the yearning that Salaar's leading men (played by Prabhas and Prithviraj Sukumaran) feel for each other, but did not have the courage to play up this stirring emotion, or take it forward.

That's because patriarchal cinema, like patriarchy, has as little tolerance for hom*osexuality as it has for heterogeneity among men, kind men who do not oppress women, non-violent men, men who mature, and, of course, women with a voice -- the sort of men and women characters who emerge organically from a feminist gaze in films like LL.

(The writer is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic)

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