The year of the ‘sakhi’

Ridiculously enough, many films around the world still fail it.

Indian women directors and screenwriters sliced up the clutter of big-budget, star-fuelled spectacles with huge dollops of novelty. Their narratives draw on their experiences and their gaze on the human condition: Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, the most celebrated around the world; Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls; Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies; Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, set entirely in Manipur, which had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival under the ‘Discovery’ section; Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, UK’s official entry to the Oscars; Rima Das’s Village Rockstars 2, a rare indie sequel; Nishtha Jain’s immersive documentary Farming the Revolution, set in the farmers’ protests of 2023, which won Best International Feature at Hot Docs 2024.

Nothing prepared movie lovers, critics and curators for the staggering response Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light received on the international stage from May onwards. A film written and directed by an Indian woman in her mid-30s, with a cast that included actresses from Malayalam cinema and Marathi/Hindi cinema, in three Indian languages, about three women working in the lower rungs of a medium-sized medical establishment, about inter-faith love, and female camaraderie and resistance, won the Cannes Grand Prix. The Cannes feed showed the four women, Kapadia, Malayalam actresses Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, and Marathi/Hindi actress Chhaya Kadam accept the honours for their work flaunting Indian glamour, quiet confidence and Cheshire Cat grins.

Actresses Kani Kusruti and Chhaya Kadam are each in two of these films — Kusruti in All We Imagine As Light, as well as Girls Will Be Girls, and Chaya Kadam in All We Imagine As Light as well as Laapataa Ladies. Both primarily act in regional language films — Malayalam and Marathi. Both are what every groomed, branded, radiant star actress in Indian films is not. Kusruti was born in rural Kerala to social activist and rationalist parents, who had dropped their last names to erase the social hierarchy marker that comes with last names in India. At 15, she invented her last name ‘Kusruti' (meaning ‘mischievous’ in Malayalam) to fill in a requirement in her class 10th exam application. She studied physical theatre in Kerala and Paris before acting in Malayalam films. Kadam, also with a formidable background in Marathi theatre, is known for her roles in Nagraj Manjule films, Fandry, Sairat, and Jhund, which demand her to engage with social realities as much as with acting craft.

Kapadia’s three lead characters in the film, Prabha (Kusruti), Anu (Prabha) and Parvaty (Kadam) could be characters from any great film by Satyajit Ray or Shyam Benegal — attuned to feelings of drift, up against a system unfriendly to them and yet deeply rooted in a sense of place and to their work. In the film’s most revelatory moments, Prabha’s melancholic-eyed wisdom about life and Anu’s determination to experience joy don’t clash; they harmonise. As it does also in Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, which was India’s official entry to the Oscars for 2024.

Friendship, these two films remind us, can be a profound act of resistance. For each other, Prabha, Anu, Paravaty, or Manju Maai and Phool in Laapataa Ladies, or for Mira and Anila in Girls Will Be Girls, are like family (you need, or hate, or can’t forsake them), a beloved (you are jealous, and you are so sensitive to their slights) and also an alternative self, all squashed into one.

In Rao’s splendid social comedy, the astute and cynical street brio of Manju Maai (Kadam), a chai-seller at a railway junction and Phool (Nitanshi Goel), simmers hope in the young, just married (and separated from her husband because of a bizarre and entirely believable twist in the plot) Phool like she makes chai: always on a boil, always ready to be stirred, always on survival mode. Hope is a balm, respite as well as a propeller also in Kapadia’s film — when Prabha sinks to the floor of her kitchen one rainy night and folds her husband’s gift in a silent, wrenching embrace as if the red rice cooker contains her every last grain of her hope; when the three friends embrace the youngest’s inter-faith love, shooting the sea breeze at a village beach shack in rural Ratnagiri, hope is the emotion, accented by their beautiful sense of surrender to camaraderie, and to be beside each other. The climactic moment in All We Imagine As Light is sublime in its quiet resistance to the crushing pressure of living with so less of visibility in society, and so much of traditional binds.

Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls is about a mother and a daughter, and here too, the intangible becomes a resolution—for the plot as well as for the characters. Mira the daughter (Preeti Panigrahi) and Anila the mom (Kusruti) don’t end up cementing their frenemy tugs that puncture almost the entire film. They can never break each other; in contrast, the film ends with a quiet sense of possibility and hope. Even as the mom-daughter relationship grows more fraught, their interdependence more complicated, there is the unspoken sense, through a scene where the daughter is oiling her mother’s hair, that they are emotionally and psychologically conjoined.

And this is what’s interesting about friendship as the basis for all these stories: Their elasticity. Romance lends itself to declarations, defining events, hurdles and societal preconditions to accept or fight, but friendship eludes these things. These films, and a mainstream OTT film, Crew (Kareena Kapoor Khan, Tabu and Kriti Sanon as air hostesses) reclaim the female friendship narrative like no other time in Indian film history. A toppling of the saas-bahu canon, a new gaze on how women exist for each other and the world, a serum to cure the normalised anti-individual staples of womanhood in Indian movies — call it what you want, this mini-revolution on screen in 2024. Just don’t reduce it to labels like “feminist” films.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and critic. Write to her at Sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com