Laaga Chunari Mein Daag

Yash Raj Films’ latest offering Laaga Chunari Mein Daag had a lot going for it, despite its regressive-to-the-point-of-insulting title. It had Pradeep Sarkar, a director who had shown promise in Parineeta; it had three good actresses from different generations – Jaya Bachchan, Rani Mukherjee and Konkona Sen-Sharma; it had a talented music director in Shantanu Moitra and an interesting lyricist in Swanand Kirkire; it had the rich locale of Banaras to explore; and it had loads of money. Perhaps the last was its undoing. Was it the production house that sealed its fate or was it Pradeep Sarkar? After all, the director always has a choice – to make the film he wants to or to not make the film he does not believe in.

The trouble is not as much with the story – of a woman who turns to prostitution to save her family – as with the way it is told, which is clichéd, sexist and dubiously plotted. The film is a record of sorts in its collection of stereotypes. The suffering, weeping mother (Jaya Bachchan) on the sewing machine, the passive father (Anupam Kher) pining for a male child who has a heart attack whenever he is expected to act, the wise and responsible elder daughter, the innocent and carefree younger sister (Konkona Sen-Sharma), the villainous chacha (Tinu Anand) in the village, the ravenous employer in the city, the ‘friendly’ soul who gets the heroine into prostitution and, not to forget, Prince charming coming to rescue with just the right dialogue, ‘Pehle to main tumse pyar karta tha (complete with beat, focus shifts, crane up and down), ab main tumhari izzat karne laga hoon’ [Earlier I had only loved you, now I have begun to respect you]!. And as if these stock characters were not enough, the film is full of stock situations and song-and-dance routines.

With the same impudence with which the filmmaker lines up his stale characters and situations, he also eschews every logic and reasoning in telling his story. The Sahay family is shown in financial mess (the struggling family abode happens to be the palace of the ex-Maharaja of Banaras. The choice is either an unintentional commentary in irony to show what has become of the Maharajas of India – their palaces now need repairs, families in such need of money that they are selling away books, their children driven to prostitution and so on. Or this is how big production houses imagines poverty, like the fabled comment by Queen Marie Antoinette of France, who reflecting on paucity of food for her citizens had suggested, ‘if you don’t have bread eat cakes’). In any case, the Sahays have so little money that their elder daughter, Vibhavari (Rani Mukherjee) is not able to complete her schooling (disregarding the fact that the government schools charge next to nothing); instead she sits at home, and occasionally makes a few deliveries for her mother who runs the household by stitching petticoats! And then suddenly, this conventional family agrees to send their daughter all the way to Mumbai on a paper-thin pretext? How the events unfold in Mumbai is all the more implausible. It is not surprising that Vibha takes up prostitution (though not before she changes her name to corrupt and anglicized Natasha). With the kind of money she needs, that too quickly, perhaps prostitution is logical. But what defies logic is her overnight transformation. Soon she not only starts speaking English, but has opinions on Trademarks and Patents! She has a client who gifts her a posh flat without ever being seen enjoying her services (it is also difficult to imagine Vibha/ Natasha being good at her job: she is perpetually shown guilt-ridden and cold to men). The same client (Murali Sharma) gives her a business class ticket to Switzerland and then when she is there, he walks away with two firang babes by his side in a seedy 70s-style (this sub-plot being a pretext for Vibha to meet her rescuer in Abhishek Bachchan). Her sister and father never find out what she does for a living but a cousin (Sushant Singh) from Banaras finds her exact charges for a night. The questions are endless and most remain unanswered.

The film that apparently is about ‘a woman’s journey’, starts on a flawed premise – the patriarchal and tastelessly hypocritical idea of the ‘purity’ of women. The same idea of ‘purity’ that has enabled generations of men to control women’s desires and freedom and so often picked up by its wrong end in Bombay films. The world of Laaga… is controlled by men. The weak and sexist father controls his daughter in a way that she feels forced to prove her worth to him. The evil chacha and his son drive the Sahay family women to despair, the mother has the courage to stop them but cannot do so without her husband’s support. It’s a man that helps Vibha look for a job and it’s a man who sexually exploits her by promising her one. Vibha’s money and pleasures and tortures all come from men. She has a huge flat, sends loads of money home, travels to Europe but is instantly brought to her knees by her cousin’s blackmailing. She is powerless in front of the society and even her family- they can stop her from attending her sister’s wedding. Her family’s acceptance of her is satisfying but short-lived, for the threat of the evil cousin and through him the society, is hanging like Damocles’ sword. And who but a man can save her from a lifetime of ignominy? So, in the end it’s not the sisters, Vibhavari and Shubhavari who come out to confront their uncle and fight for their honour; this job is to be done by their men suitors. The end of the film is as disappointing as the title. Is the filmmaker trying to establish the heroine’s purity by having the hero accept her? Or is he trying to establish the special-appearance-hero’s (Abhishek Bachchan ’s) magnanimity? Whatever the filmmaker’s intentions, what the film says is that without a man’s acceptance and support a woman cannot find her place in society.

The music composer, Shantanu Moitra loses a sense of balance in trying to put local flavour in the songs. So while the Benaras numbers are weak copies of local tunes (in fact, Kacchi kaliyan… is more akin to a Punjabi hip-hop), the ones in Europe are impossible to recall. Something similar happens to Kirkire’s lyrics. The only one that you remember paying any attention to is ‘Hum to aise hain bhaiya… ’. However, this song that presumes to talk about the way of life of the Banarasis seems ill-placed when mouthed self-consciously by the Banarasi sisters themselves.

Some well-intentioned sub plots didn’t fire away as intended. One such plot could have been of the local courtesan (Hema Malini) in Banaras seen with envy by young sisters in the beginning, and who receives the innocence-lost Vibha with knowledge and understanding. In a film as un-original and hackneyed as this, what were the actors supposed to achieve? Nonetheless, Konkona looks natural next to the melodramatic Rani Mukherjee. But Jaya Bachchan is the one who excels in trying to convey the woes and fears of middle-class north Indian women trying to run difficult homes, by being difficult, on other member of the family too but mostly on themselves. To appreciate Jaya’s achievement, one will, however, need to see her act removed from the incredulous situation her character is put in and lines she has to mouth. In a film that is failing at several fronts this must be some accident and is bound to go unnoticed.