Love, drama, aur dysfunction

As always, it is the alternative that leads the bandwagon away from films like Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (with traditional families) to films like Masaan (with families that show cracks). Film scholar Shubham Roy Chowdhury, who works at the India Foundation for the Arts, says, “It should be remembered that this is the same audience that watches supremely derogatory and patriarchal family serials everyday. Anything beyond that often fails to leave a mark. Films are no more the only source of entertainment, it’s the same stars, same industry, same entertainment apparatus. Everything is linked. Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan shows the aspiring India where the dad is present, but is often a defeated, hence benevolent patriarch – one who tries to tighten the grip but fails miserably hence let’s the sons and daughters go but obviously, they cannot do what they want to do staying in the same environment. That divide is almost real and crafty, on the part of the makers, but it is also only a slight sentimental shift.”

With a film like Naanu Avanalla...Avalu, Kannada cinema strikes down the same construct of a family built on gender roles as does a brilliant Deepika Padukone in Piku, albeit with lesser challenge to the audience than Kalki Koechlin in Margarita with a Straw. Pooja Ruparel, who acted as Kajol’s younger sister in the film that sparked off Bollywood’s first movement away from the family – Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge – thinks that it is the women who are to be appreciated for the shift. The Bengaluru girl says, “The film that I was a part of this year, the multi-directorial X - Past is Present which released on the day before my birthday, was a film that I thought treated family and relationships in a new way entirely. The lead man, played by Rajat Kapoor, is on a journey to reconcile himself in a way that is quite new for Indian cinema. In Ankhon Dekhi as well, there is a noted move away from the dogma of the daughter and the wife playing only roles that have been assigned to them by society. Women are stepping out of roles and into characters.”

2015 has also been the year when the framework of separations, divorces and death was inculcated into mainstream cinema, in what is clearly a brazen move for the large silver screen. Sociology student Anamika Das says, “What we see in films like Tanu Weds Manu 2 or the Tamil film Thanga Magan is not just an acceptance of the fact that idyllic relationships break but also an acknowledgement that this too is a story, even though it may not be perfect in the most hetero-normative way possible.”