BackPolitician, queen, lover
She's shown fretting about her beloved more than doing her job. Few films about women in power break that mould
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She makes her entrance in a mostly male movie wrapped in a carpet, out of which she emerges backside first. When Julius Caesar kisses her forcibly, she warns him that he should be careful what he wishes for.
Queen or commoner, no woman is ever allowed to forget her sexuality, especially when she is Cleopatra, or, in this case, Elizabeth Taylor as the Egyptian empress, self-mythologizer extraordinaire and stealer of the hearts of Caesar and Mark Antony—the former played by a sardonic Rex Harrison and the latter by a combustible Richard Burton in short skirts. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, made in 1963, is very long (over 4 hours), very wordy and very dressed up, but also very engrossing. As a study of a woman in power, it’s perhaps too much in thrall to Taylor’s beauty, but it also allows Cleopatra her tantrums without undermining her wit and intelligence and shows her going beyond seducing thigh-baring Romans.
For more rounded accounts of women manoeuvring their way through male bastions, we have to travel to the past, as far as creative licence and the imagination allow. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, about Queen Elizabeth I, is the supremely entertaining yarn of how a reluctant heiress overcomes doubt, both within herself and in those surrounding her, to become the ruler of England. Kapur would have been the perfect choice to direct a biopic of another reluctant inheritor who defied detractors and emerged as one of the most powerful political figures in India. Indira Gandhi might have served the nation as prime minister for 15 years, but all we have to mark her influential reign is a non-biopic in which a character loosely modelled on her is torn between her ambitions and her love.
Suchitra Sen’s Aarti Devi in Gulzar’s Aandhi shares Mrs G’s love for handloom saris and streak of white hair, but the resemblance ends there. Aandhi is not so much about statecraft as about the human heart. It’s actually a working woman anxiety picture with a political backdrop—replace the political outfit that, in the mid-1970s, could only be the then all-powerful Congress party, with a corporation and convert Aarti Devi into a managing director who must choose between home and the world and the movie won’t change too much.
The love angle also dogs depictions of Razia Sultan, the first woman to rule the Delhi Sultanate from 1236-40. The films on her—Razia Sultana in 1961, starring Nirupa Roy, and Razia Sutan in 1983, with Hema Malini—are less about the political impact of her rule and more about how she managed the flutter of her heartbeats. Razia’s beauty, her relationship with the governor Altunia and her Abyssinian Siddi adviser Yaqut, and her singing skills take clear precedence over her ability to rule.
Given the climate that has been created against the depiction of leaders in post-independent India, this is the best we can expect. The threat of censorship in various forms—vandalism, effigy-burning, ink-throwing, slipper-hurling, public interest litigation, backroom pressure—resulting from the belief that a national leader’s life is too hallowed to be filmed in any way has all but killed the political biopic. Thanks to a reasonably healthy record of female chief ministers and politicians in India (with many more likely to be added after this year’s Lok Sabha election results), we have had several fictional counterparts, but their depictions don’t inspire much confidence. Just as bad as the grubby-handed male politician is the corrupt female politician (Kiran Juneja Sippy in Sahi Dhandhe Galat Bande, Shabana Azmi in Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, Juhi Chawla in Gulaab Gang). If they’re not venal, they’re helpless and waiting for the likes of Shah Rukh Khan to rescue them from schemers and assassins (Rakhee’s Goa chief minister in Baadshah).
One of the few movies in which a woman is actually shown doing her job rather than fretting about her beloved is, of all things, Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One, in which Glenn Close’s vice-president (Kathryn Bennett) takes charge after Kazakhi terrorists hijack the plane carrying Harrison Ford’s president and his entourage. For once, it’s the man who’s worrying about his family, which is also on the plane, even as his deputy hardens her jawline and negotiates her way through an increasingly tense stand-off.
Bennett’s brains on the ground match the president’s brawn in the sky. Of course, she refuses to sign an order to take over the presidency when all seems to be lost. Women always know their place, whether it’s in the bedroom or the cabinet.
This fortnightly column tries to make sense of news, one movie at a time.
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