Bollywood-sanctioned social-issue dramas — competently made, left-leaning rebuttals to some of the most incompetently made right-wing propagandist dramas — tend to prioritize fierce rebellion over detailed interrogation. Understandably so: our filmmakers, often silenced by right-wing trolls or hampered by India’s archaic certification (not censorship) board demanding all kinds of absurd cuts, are trying their level best to cancel out the decibel of nonsensical nonsense coming from the right with their loudest possible political expression against it. But is that really all that productive? Take, for instance, director Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 (2019) — a film that tries to marry didacticism with procedural drama to, at best, mixed results. Its premise of an upper-caste officer investigating the disappearance of three girls in a village lends itself naturally to the character (and us) discovering that deep-rooted caste-based oppression is responsible for said disappearances. But both director and actor Ayushmann Khurrana prefer stopping the film repeatedly to tell (or yell) this to us. Their anger — expressed loudly, clearly, and pointedly — is deeply felt, but it comes at the cost of the film’s drama, which increasingly succumbs to an upper-caste “savior” narrative, sidelining the Dalit characters it consistently says it wants to put a spotlight on. There’s also little to no attempt made at highlighting the intersectionality of caste-based-oppression with religious- and gender-based-oppression: for that, we need to see two other (more accomplished) films directed by Sinha: Mulk (2018) and Thappad (2020), projects which are singularly focused on educating its viewers about India’s incessant Islamophobia and poisonous patriarchy, respectively.
Sandhya Suri’s Santosh is an accomplished rarity, then: a white-knuckled procedural thriller that manages to communicate all this in 128 minutes without ever needing to stop its drama to tell us what it’s actually about. It takes the generic template of Sinha’s Article 15: here, it’s a 28-year-old widow, Santosh (Shahana Goswami), inheriting her late husband’s job as a police constable, investigating the rape and murder of a Dalit girl in a rural village in North India. But rather than becoming an angrily outspoken treatise on the absurdity of caste oppression in India, it remains a quietly observational character study that uses its reactive (as opposed to proactive) protagonist to reveal the frightening ease with which one can get trapped in the country’s tangled web of caste-based oppression, religious intolerance, and patriarchal violence.
This solemn passivity — shot cinema verité-style, unaided by any non-diegetic background score or declarative performance tics — is bound to be a sticking point for those who associate Indian cinema solely with a certain kind of testosterone-fueled, heightened dramaticism. (The fact that the film is an international co-production and the UK’s official submission for the Best International Feature at the upcoming Oscars further disqualifies it as being “Indian.”) But why limit the definition of Indianness to a certain kind of maximalism? Suri’s documentarian sensibilities — Santosh was initially conceived as a non-narrative feature about the violence committed against women in India — lend themselves so naturally to exploring and exposing the façade of performativity practiced by nearly everyone to maintain the status quo that any attempt to overdramatize this feels entirely unnecessary. Her film never indulges in the form of Euro-exoticism that Danny Boyle’s Best-Picture-Winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was critically lambasted for; it also, barring a touching but falsely cathartic moment toward its end, never succumbs to easy moralizing.
Rather, it’s content to simply follows its protagonist. Suri often frames Santosh sitting quietly in isolation, with overly confident voices of her fellow male officers, constantly talking crudely about the victim’s lower caste identity and the supposed perpetrator’s Muslim identity, filling up whatever space Santosh may otherwise have for critical thought. Even when she’s allowed to have a conversation with a senior female officer, Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar, giving a deceptively relaxed performance), it never feels like she’s really talking; Suri, in these sequences, highlights Santosh’s daughter-like obedience to Geeta, her desire to feel accepted by her senior. Partly, the director conveys this through clever framing — Geeta consistently has her hand over (as opposed to around) Santosh — an eerie callback to the film’s opening extreme close-up of a motherly hand consoling and controlling a bereaved Santosh. But mainly, she allows Goswami — giving a remarkably modulated central performance, on par with Zoe Ziegler’s in Janet Planet and Lily Collias’ in Good One as the best reactive performances of 2024 — to convey her character’s hesitancy through her restless, at times almost cowering, body language. It represents the consistent tension within Santosh: of wanting to question her authority figures about their ideologies and investigative methods but not being able to do so because she also seeks their approval. Her big, wide eyes — which seem to get bigger when she realizes what is going on — betray that fundamental hesitancy: they carry within them a burning desire for justice, a passionately Bollywoodized rebellion against caste-based oppression, Islamophobia, and patriarchy. But it’s only for the odd little moment. Suri is cognizant enough to use Santosh’s POV only to reveal India’s murky socio-political realities, not offer a rebel’s simplified utopian solution to it. To that end, the titular character’s rebellion in Santosh is precisely the opposite of a Bollywood-sanctioned-social-issue film: devoid of loud and clear performativity, and instead filled with a valuable form of hauntingly probing uncertainty.
DIRECTOR: Sandhya Suri; CAST: Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar, Nawal Shukla, Pratibha Awashti; DISTRIBUTOR: Metrograph Pictures; IN THEATERS: December 27; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 5 min.
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