Film Review: PARCHED

In a country where archaic laws prevail, especially over women, and in a society where hollow traditions are hallowed, a film with a subject so bold as to tackle female emancipation has to be lauded.

Set in an obscure village in Rajasthan, the film has four protagonists, all of them subjugated in various ways. There’s 32-year-old Rani (Tanishtha Chatterjee), who’s been a widow half her life, and who sets out to ‘buy’ a bride for her 17-year-old son Gulab, who’s yet to sport proper facial hair. She finds one in an adjacent village — 15-year-old Janaki (Lehar Khan). Rani’s bosom pal is Lajjo (Radhika Apte), considered infertile, and constantly subjected to physical violence by her alcoholic husband.

Yadav depicts a patriarchal society where women are servile, pandering to the whims of their wayward and abusive — verbal and physical — husbands. Both Rani and Lajjo work for a local garment manufacturer Kishan, who bears the physical brunt of the local youth for treating his female employees fairly and humanely.

Rani and Lajjo befriend Bijli (Surveen Chawla), a carnival dancer who has no compunctions about going the entire way with her clients if the price is right. The gregarious Bijli even prescribes a ‘remedy’ for the barren Lajjo, whose freedom is envied, at once stage, by Rani and Lajjo, whose miserable lives compel them to seek solace in one another.

An appropriate background score and taut editing (a fine inter-cutting of scenes of a hut on fire with the burning of Raavan) help the narrative to proceed seamlessly.  Shot by the award-winning cinematographer Russell Carpenter (‘Titanic’), ‘Parched’ has, at the core of its story, women’s lib in rural India. Apart from explicit scenes, innuendos in the dialogues (the dialect is a mix of Hindi-Gujarati) and sub-titles such as ‘only one thing make a woman’s skin glow’ abound.

Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (2015), Yadav doesn’t pull punches in exhibiting India as a male-dominated society.