The Great Indian Kitchen: the recipe for success as below.
Ingredients
- One measure of the good
- One measure of the bad
- One measure of the ugly
Directions
Turn back the clock a hundred years. Retain electronic gadgets and newer modes of transportation from the current age. Combine all ingredients in a majestic old bowl house and whip them into a frenzy. Rinse-n-Repeat. Each day. Every day. Save the last dance.
The good: Some truths need to be made into films. As many films as you can, to hammer the point home. This movie would have been a decent documentary and could have even made it to a few international film festivals if it was made by a white woman film maker on a noble mission to empower and bring freedom to third world women. As a regional Indian feature film it found the right audience though - the local south (or north, with subtitles) Indian men who have been blissfully living their sedentary lives while their better halves toil from sunrise to midnight in the kitchen. If these wives work outside their home, the toiling continues at their work-place too. The cook-clean-perform wifely duties narration, executed in a minimally perfect style by the director, Jeo Baby, hits the mark.
The fact that this movie got to be made as a feature film and not a documentary, thus reaching a wider audience, is inspirational. The dialog it has created on different platforms and groups is the ultimate goal of social impact films. The movie has a feminist theme and the female lead is the real lead of the movie with more screen-time than any of her male counterparts. Nimisha Sajayan is perfect as a new bride turned house-wife. Suraj Venjaramoodu has reliable job security as Nimisha's onscreen husband if her career continues on the upswing.
The bad (a tiny-bit frazzling): Why do I feel like Jeo Baby is Blessy in new clothes? Not that Blessy has gone anywhere - can't wait to unwatch Aadujeevitham when it hits the theaters. I am all braced up to re-read Benyamin's novel to get rid of the taste of the movie, which I do intend to watch in order to write a biased review right afterwards.
There was shades of Blessy in Jeo Baby's previous directorial venture Kilometers and Kilometers. The social cause part, a signature of Blessy's films was missing in Kms & Kms, but it made it up with a surplus of the virtuous characters without any real depth.
In The Great Indian Kitchen, the Blessyness comes from its kitschy moralization, absolute disregard of grey areas and its social justice theme, which only focuses on the extremes. Unlike Blessy whose heroes were always those few good men in our midst who operate in a perpetual God mode, Jeo Baby is more open-minded and trains his camera on a woman, who since she is a woman has not unlocked the God mode.
Like Blessy with his moralizing movies, Jeo Baby in TGIK, comes across as this self-righteous and principled unicorn crusader against the specter of patriarchy that hangs permanently over Indian woman kind, like grey clouds on a typical Seattle sky. TGIK must have begun its life in the spasmodic vibrations of a tuning fork triggered picking on the preachy sentiments of keyboard activists and social media warriors. The media - social and traditional is lapping up the spirit of revolution Baby's movie has unleashed on the morality militia. It is constructive in a sense, but anything holier than thou is a suspect in my book.
The suspicion proves valid when the audience is asked to believe the impossible. The story takes place at a huge family house spread out like a lumbering, grounded, two-storied jet plane. While it looks squeaky clean (except the kitchen/dining area which resembles a battle-field most of the time) we are asked to believe it does not have any full time retinue of maids or cleaners. Cleaning that house looks like a week long project. The kind of project that calls for project trackers, Gantt charts and responsibility matrices, and should only be attempted as a sub-project before bigger projects like weddings or funerals. But according to the movie, the new bride is expected to clean it every day?
Then there was a tiny side story injected into the script that was totally unnecessary. The audience would miss the activist episode if they blinked. What purpose did it serve other than incite some fringe religious or political group? Maybe the intent was to create a PR controversy and make more people watch the movie?
The ugly: It is about half a century late. The story probably takes place in the early 1900s where they happen to have cellphones, cars and refrigerators. Or else in this day and age, where in Kerala is a woman routinely quarantined for almost a week due to her 'impure' menstrual period?
There is no subtlety in the way the message of feminism is inflicted upon the viewer. I am as feminist as they come. But this movie is like someone's take on feminism after reading a few WhatsApp forwards on the subject and doing-your-own-research on YouTube. It goes from a dark feminist zero to a blinding hundred without passing through any modulatory gray zones in-between.
Dance, according to the revelation I received after watching TGIK, is a safe and accepted career choice for female feminists in Kerala/India. Kerala is the highly literate Indian state where almost every millennial adult woman has a Bachelor's degree at the minimum, usually in a STEM field. But as a nascent feminist she will seek her emancipation only through arts or so the movie tells us. Not that there is anything wrong with arts jobs, it just doesn't make it through my ground truthing sensor.
Nimisha Sajayan who does not have a single dance bone in her body looks utterly out of place as a dance director in her new woke life. Even as she is reviewing the final rehearsal of her dance troupe, she is a detached spectator, her body feels rigid, while impassively watching a fluid dance performance which she supposedly directed.
The last dance: The fusion dance group looks absolutely stunning - a beautiful blend of Thai/Far-east dance with Kerala's kathakali (in looks.)
Jeo Baby, go on make some more movies, now that the conversation has started, let's keep it going. Get this man some producers.
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