Parched (Hindi)
Director: Leena Yadav
Cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Radhika Apte, Surveen Chawla, Sayani Gupta, Adil Hussain, Lehar Khan, Sumeet Vyas
From Akira and Island City to Pink and now Parched. It has been a month of watching “women’s” films—with women characters, about women’s issues—and has boiled down to some visceral reactions from the audience. So be it for this week as well.
Only with Parched it has been all about an intuitive backing away and questioning, rather than an overwhelming acceptance of what plays on-screen.
Perhaps because it feels too created and staged rather than organic and rooted. Be it the curious mishmash of the Gujarat-Rajasthan setting in this “somewhere in the deserts of North-West India” world.
Perhaps Parched also irks because it’s clearly an outsider’s gaze. The “exotic rural Indian women can be so playful and sexually aware even if repressed” angle seems targeted at surprising the clueless West or the urban Indians who are living in some weird bubble of their own making.
There is far too much that the filmmaker wants to pack in and nowhere does it get more pronounced than in the figure of Champa (Sayani Gupta) who comes early on in the film and then vanishes.
The so-called strong women in mainstream Hindi cinema have traditionally been battered and bruised souls who overcome patriarchy by entirely doing away with men—literally and/or metaphorically. The device has been like a subliminal, indirect wish fulfilment and release for the smothered women viewers as well. Parched goes back to a world neatly divided between all the bad men (there’s just a token nice social worker) and the much abused yet tough women who will rise up to fight them. As much as they wither away with men, they flower in each other’s company.
So you have a 32-year-old widow Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee) with an entitled 17-year-old son Gulab who she marries off to Janaki (Lehar Khan). A regular phone call from some stranger is her escape from the banal life. There is her friend Lajjo (Radhika Apte) saddled with an abusive, alcoholic husband and the badge of barrenness.
It’s not as though there isn’t enough meat in the story. Rani could have been a fascinating character—a victim of patriarchy yet somewhere is also a perpetuator of it, till she breaks lose from it herself. But the depiction gets way too flat, not just when it comes to her but other characters and situations as well.
NAMRATA JOSHI
Parched is an unconvincing indictment of patriarchy that
feels staged
