Female perspective, rape and consent comes in low budget horror, Phobia

Which is the scariest movie you have ever seen?

I’d give The Shining a top rating; the movie relishes the slow decline of a father into insanity. The familiar and most loving, becomes bewilderingly unfamiliar, and the audience begins to test its own sanity and understanding.

I’d also rate Rosemary’s Baby very highly. It’s a movie on motherhood, the motherhood of something evil; and the gaze of the father and the mother on that very evil is radically different. The woman can’t believe what she has given birth to, and can’t shake the feeling that she has been raped, the father keeps a distance from both allegations and allegories.

There aren’t any Bollywood movies on my "most scary" list, because Bollywood does big horror. A chaat of Chudail and Chandalika, sans characterisation. But wait. Today, I’ll add the just released Phobia to the list of scary movies that deserves your time.

Like The Shining, this movie too turns the familiar into the unfamiliar: are you crazy? Is the protagonist crazy? Is everyone else but you and the protagonist crazy? The smallest of things: a vase, a photo frame, a bathtub, an ice tray become eerily unfamiliar. But most remarkably, this movie presents an exclusively female perspective, which marks it out like a neon light from the rest of Bollywood reel.

The female hero

We are in the middle of the rise of female heroes in Bollywood. There are female cops in Jai Gangaajal, female lawyers in Jazbaa, female rights-crusaders in Sarbjit, a female nut job in Tanu Weds Manu Returns. As an independent woman myself, I’m happy these movies are being made, but they don’t personally mean much to me.

Like the Muslim director Kabir Khan once said he looks forward to seeing "normal" Muslims on screen, I too want to see "normal" women on screen. Not always do I want to see women who can land a kick, a punch, a well-aimed banshee scream (even the trailers of a couple of Rai starrers seemed to rely on decibel level rather than emotional heft).

I don’t need to always watch superstars or superheroes who are women, though they are absolutely enchanting (and I’m looking forward to the Marvel Wonder Woman movie). I would occasionally like to see normal women, going about their plebeian concerns, and finding madness — or redemption — in the mirror, in the drawing room, in a moment before she pours the ice in a cold coffee, in an un-manicured, just-woken-up but manically emoting face. That’s life, isn’t it?

Radhika Apte is that sort of a woman. For too long we have had these fantastically beautiful women on screen, who look like they’ve spent more time putting on makeup to look like they don’t have makeup on, when they go "de-glam" for ‘realistic’ roles.

Apte, on the other hand, has the courage to be gritty, sweaty, sporting bad nail-polish, smeared kajal, no makeup, and expressions that belong to the deepest, the craziest of human recesses. There are no wigs, no lush lashes, no deep cleavage, just close up after close up of top-notch acting, warts and freckles and all.

One of my favourite movies is Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, where a normally oozing-in-sex-appeal Al Pacino plays a bad cop who is always sleepy during an Alaskan summer. The camera lingers obsessively on his haggard face, his drooping eyes, the succulent bags under his eyes, the very redness of the whites of his eyes. It lingers enough for you to want to scream. You want to throw a glass of ice at his face, or you want to put him to sleep on a bed made of lush down feathers.

In Phobia, the close up, sans makeup, sans being made-up, is so tight and plentiful that you may accept the woman on screen as part of your life forever, or alternatively, want to wash her face for her; as she battles her demons, insubstantial to all but her.

Apte puts in a cracker of a performance. She is needy, she is selfish, she is haunted, she has post-traumatic stress from a rape attempt made on her, she is mercurial, she is kind. You can’t slot her. Men may come away pissed at her character, because she doesn’t like collapsing the "friend zone" into "something more".

Women may come away marvelling at how many emotional punches the actress makes. Many of us are exactly all these things, though popular mores say we women should be more accommodating than demanding, more angelic than moody, sporting more platitudes than the diamonds we are gifted.

The friendship movie

Bollywood has made some trendy friendship movies, and I’ve liked some, and not liked some. Dil Chahta Hai was fun, though all the characters were irritating though likeable overall (rather than unlikeable, like some close friends tend to be). Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara was formulaic and boring, Dil Dhadakne Do was flaky, Angry Indian Goddesses was contrived.

I’ve actually found good commentaries on friendship in unexpected movies recently, a Marvel superhero featuring a galaxy of superstars, for one. Captain America: Civil War had unexpectedly moving passages on friendship. And equally unexpectedly, Phobia too explores themes of friendship: girl-girl friendship where the protagonist doesn’t hesitate to ask the other to "get out", and male-female friendship with all its undertones (or the absence of those undertones).

Most surprisingly, one of the best comments on rape and consent comes from this low-budget horror movie. And no apologies are sought, or made, by the woman who ultimately makes her very own, very non-preachy choices. The female protagonist has truly arrived.