'Provoked' belongs to Aishwarya
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Film:
"Provoked"; Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Naveen Andrews, Miranda Richardson,
Robbie Coltrane, Nandita Das; Director: Jagmohan Mundhra; Writer: Carl
Austen & Rahila Gupta; Music Director: A.R. Rahman; Ratings: *** In
Irish novelist Roddy Doyle's "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors", the
battered wife Paula keeps justifying her bruises by saying she as a
habit walks into closed doors and hurts herself.
The battered
wife Kiranjit Ahluwalia in Jagmohan Mundhra's jolting exposй on
domestic values never gets a chance to walk in or out of that closed
London door where she lives with her brutal husband. She chooses her
husband's death over her own exit.
It's amazing how the
true-life Kiranjit found freedom by setting her abusive husband on
fire. In one of the film's most sensitively delineated dialogues,
Kiranjit says to her rather overly benign prison-mates, "I've never
felt freer in my life."
What sort of trauma would it take for a woman to feel free in prison?
"Provoked"
answers the complicated question of domestic disharmony with a deft and
direct approach to the question of a woman's place in the man's
'scream' of things.
The intermittent flashbacks showing
Kiranjit's spousal nightmare, cut deep and hard into the narrative.
Full credit to Aishwarya Rai for plunging deep into a part that she
plays from her heart.
True, at times she looks too pretty to
be ravaged. But the vulnerable, fragile, little-girl-lost quality in
her personality works to great advantage in portraying the
spouse-burning victim as a woman scorned beyond endurance.
There're moments in the narrative where Aishwarya melts your heart like an ice-cream cone left out in the sun for too long.
Madhu
Ambat's cinematography is so sweeping in its specificity that it
creates a spatial bond between the protagonist's heart and her
hostile-to-compassionate surroundings.
Mundhra and Sanjay
Mirajkar have edited the harsh material with extreme economy of
expression. The film moves mercilessly forward leaving no room for a
breather.
Among the unforgettable sequences, count the one where
the stern lady constable asks Kiranjit to take off her jewellery and
clothes. Kiranjit pleads in hushed anguish, "Never take clothes off in
front of husband."
Aishwarya's inherent inhibitions give the
character a mocking edge. How could this tender woman set her husband
on fire? Imagine the levels of torture she must have suffered!
Blessedly,
we are shown only fragments of Kiranjit's trauma. Director Mundhra
makes sure they are enough scenes to make us wince without making our
stomachs churn.
Cleverly but tenderly formatted as a
thriller-in-flashback, "Provoked" opens with the burning figure of
Deepak Ahluwalia (Naveen Andrews) running screaming out of his house.
Mundhra moves smoothly backwards into events leading to this gruesome
incident.
Female bonding has always been a favourite theme in
Mundhra's films - remember Shabana Azmi and Deepti Naval in "Kamla? In
"Provoked" the bond that develops between Kiranjit and her cellmate
Veronica, played by Vanessa Redgrave's daughter Miranda Richardson with
supreme cheer, is remarkably well tuned to the sisters'-solidarity
theme that forms the narrative's backbone.
Nandita Das is also
in fine form as a spunky 'sister' activist holding up a torch for the
torched husband's tortured wife. Every actor in the smallest role gets
it right and bright.
Naveen Andrews's despicable brutality as the husband makes your skin crawl, as it's meant to.
But
the film clearly belongs to Aishwarya. She gets a grip on her character
Kiranjit's predicament with a fluid grace, her large eyes brimming over
with untold grief as she pleads with her lawyers, "Please let me see my
children."
By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service
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